


really got this death thing down

by TheBigCat



Category: Ruby Redfort Series - Lauren Child
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1970s with magic, Corpses, Fantasy, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Inspired by The Untamed (TV), Necromancy, Playing Fast And Loose With Both Canons, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Ruby Redfort Big Bang 2020, Suicidal Thoughts, Swords & Sorcery, Time Skips, a.k.a. almost xianxia but not quite because this is a deeply western setting, as in the time skip has already happened by the time the story starts, magical duels, magical music, so i leaned lightly into the southern gothic instead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:34:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 45,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28313877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBigCat/pseuds/TheBigCat
Summary: Five years ago, Ruby Redfort was the most feared practitioner of necromancy in the Twinford region. And then she died.The good news: thanks to an unexpected mysterious resurrection; she’s now alive, re-equipped with her trusty magical death guitar, and ready for just about anything. The bad news: well, there’s a lot of bad news. She’s cursed, for one thing. And there’s the murder attempts on the head of Spectrum Eight’s life, and her undead maybe-possessed best friend, and - there’s just a lot going on, okay?Cue sick guitar solo.
Relationships: Art Hitchen Zachary & Ruby Redfort, Blacker & Ruby Redfort, Bradley Baker/LB (background), Clancy Crew & Ruby Redfort, Ruby Redfort & Everyone
Comments: 34
Kudos: 13
Collections: Ruby Redfort Big Bang





	1. if you can’t hotwire a car with blood magic after being brought back unceremoniously from the dead and escaping from an abandoned house, when CAN you hotwire a car with blood magic

**Author's Note:**

> Hi guys and welcome to the trainwreck! AKA my obscenely long contribution to the 2020 Big Bang. Thanks to [checks notes] wren from the Discord server for egging me into writing an Untamed AU I guess?, everyone else from the server for their various contributions and encouragement, ruby-ayano, who is doing the accompanying art (I’ll link to that whenever it’s up!) and literally anyone who’s ever commented on my RR stuff over the years. Y’all rock.
> 
> This is an Untamed/MDZS AU - except it’s almost exactly nothing like the Untamed and it’s probably better if you don’t know the show because of just how fast and loose I played with the rules and plot. Essentially: monsters are real. Magic is real. The world is protected from monsters and magic by people who have magic swords and innate magical power (granted to them by a magical core). Necromancy is considered a big no-no for various reasons. Anything else... you can probably work out through context clues? I hope.
> 
> Title is a somewhat irreverent reference to ‘Death Thing’ by Amanda Palmer, which only came about because I spent nearly a full week trying to find a decent title and then decided to settle for something, anything that would fit.
> 
> Please note that all of this was written in an unedited, stream-of-consciousness chaotic writing haze, without much planning in the least, and it _shows_. Hence, the plot might not make sense and it may end up being rather inconsistent. This was not written to improve my skills, or to make the best story I’ve ever created. I wrote it for fun. Hopefully it will be fun to read! 
> 
> Updates should be every two/three days until it’s all posted. 
> 
> Merry crisis.

Ruby opens her eyes.

 _Huh,_ she thinks.

Her hands are covered in blood, and she’s in a completely unfamiliar room in a house that she doesn’t recognize. The floorboards are scratched, and the curtains are gently smouldering, and the door has been barricaded with chairs and loaded-up-suitcases and everything smells like iron and discontent.

And most importantly – and this is a pretty significant sort of thing, all things considered – _Ruby isn’t dead_.

“You have _got_ to be kidding me,” she says, and struggles to her feet, using the wall just to her left as support.

It’s a clumsy rise to her feet, because she feels like she hasn’t used her legs in maybe a decade, and her hair is a tangled ragged mess that’s falling over her eyes, and she’s not wearing her glasses, and also she’s very confused and her arm _really hurts,_ actually. She looks wildly around the room, squinting and cursing under her breath, and trying to get past the dizzying feeling of being suddenly alive in an unfamiliar location when literally five seconds ago someone had been shoving a sword through her chest. 

There’s someone pounding at the front door downstairs. Downstairs? After a moment of consideration, she judges the sound and concludes that she’s probably on the second or third floor of some sort of residence – and when she goes over to the window and curtains to put out the slowly-rising flames, she sees that she’s right. Second floor, and also this house is in the _literal middle of nowhere._ It’s hard to see without her glasses, but it looks like there’s a fence surrounding the house’s perimeter and then a lot of flat open demolished desert-looking land.

No other houses or roads in sight, and somebody’s slamming on the front door. They’re yelling something indistinct and angry.

“This can’t be good,” she says to herself, and the sound of her voice startles her. Her head hurts. Her arm hurts. Her throat is scratchy, and she still doesn’t know what’s going on.

She goes to sit back down on the ground and tries to work out what to do next, _really_ hoping that the door downstairs is sturdy enough to keep whoever-it-is outside for just a few more minutes.

Tracing her fingers along the scratches in the floorboard, she realizes that it’s actually some kind of summoning circle. Maybe not summoning circle – a curse, or a ritual of some kind? The angles of the scratches are almost familiar, and she thinks if she had maybe a few more minutes spare she might be able to reverse-engineer it and work out what it’s for – she’s always been good at that sort of thing. But she doesn’t have the time. Not if whoever’s shaking the house’s foundations with their door-slamming is as angry in-person as they sound from two storeys away.

“Rule fifteen,” she mutters reflexively, and reaches outwards, sweeping her hands along the rough and ragged floorboards, trying to see if there’s anything she’s missed. _Get all the facts before making a plan, if possible._ Whoever dumped her in the middle of a ritual circle in a room in the middle of literal nowhere probably left some kind of clue behind as to what’s actually going on here.

Ruby’s not exactly _blind_ without her glasses on, but there’s a definite limit to the things she can and can’t see. Which means that she probably can be forgiven for not noticing the carnival-style mask propped up on the floor, very close to where she is. Her fingers brush it, and she grabs it and tugs it over, squinting. The design is quietly fancy, a half-mask meant to cover the nose and eyes and not much else. Swirly intricate patterns with a few red prop-jewels embedded in it. She holds it, staring in confusion, and then feels something on its back and turns it over.

Taped to the mask, there’s a note with her name on it. It’s clearly rushed, scribbled on scrap paper and folded several times, but when she sits cross-legged on the floor and unfolds it, the actually handwriting is neat and clear. Although the content of it super, _super_ isn’t.

_Sorry about the rude awakening and sorry about the curse, but there really wasn’t any other way to do this. I don’t have much time. Your guitar’s in the storeroom in the hallway (I hope), but that’s all I have for you. Spectrum’s got all the rest of your equipment locked up. I’d say you can raid my wardrobe and my kitchen for supplies, but I don’t think we’re the same size, and I wouldn’t stick around here too long anyway. This isn’t exactly the safest place to hang out. I would have picked a better place for your miraculous resurrection, but sometimes things don’t work out like you’ve planned them._

_Anyway, the lowdown as far as you’re concerned: you’ve been dead for five years or so, I did a bunch of illegal immoral nonsense to bring you back to life, everything’s kind of gone to the dogs while you’ve been out. You don’t know me as such, but trust me, you deserve life a lot more than I do. Twinford’s ten miles to the east, Spectrum’s where it’s always been._

_Mask’s optional, if you want it. I get that you might not want to be recognized, and it’s always good to have options._

_Sorry again, kiddo._

_\- BB_

The writing gets a bit cramped and messy towards the end, as if ‘BB’ had been in a rush when finishing it off.

“Well,” says Ruby, “this is fun. And it clarifies literally _nothing_ important; thank you very much, BB.”

Except it does, sort of, because now she knows it’s definitely a necromancy sort-of-thing, and the implication is that this BB person swapped their life out for hers (and what? Why? Why would anyone do _that_ ), and – _five years_.

God.

Five years may not be a very long time in the scheme of things, and it may not even be _true_ because really all she has to go on here is a scribbled note from a complete stranger, but the very idea of it makes her stomach squirm unpleasantly.

The pounding on the door grows louder, and then there’s a short silence – and then the loud _smash_ of glass shattering. It sounds like whoever-it-is gave up on trying to break the door and went the more direct route.

“Neat. So, _that_ sounds like my cue to make like a tree. Uh – ” Ruby looks around briefly, and winces before licking a finger and smearing blood across it. Clumsily, but with the practice of someone who’s done it many, _many_ times before, she scrawls a sigil on the inside of the carnival mask. As she finishes the final stroke, it lights up bright red, and she sighs before cupping it over her face and tying it off securely.

Ruby can see now through the strangely-shaped eyeholes of the mask. It’s no substitute for her actual glasses, of course, but it’ll do until she can find something better.

She consults the note one more time, and then shoves it into her jeans pocket. Her hands are still sticky with blood, and – yeah, she’s wearing the clothes she died in, which means there’s a big bloody ragged hole torn right through the front of her coolest T-shirt. And she’s not wearing shoes. She really should’ve been wearing shoes when she’d died, that would have been a lot more convenient in the long run.

There’s something wrong with her right arm, but she doesn’t get enough time to think about that because now it sounds like someone’s coming up the stairs, and that someone sounds much bigger and much more ready to fight than she is.

Ruby shoves and kicks away the pile of furniture and boxes barricading the door, and tugs it open. The hallway she emerges into is short and dusty and looks abandoned, but there’s a door right across from her that looks a lot like a storeroom door. And it’s a crack open.

There’s only one thing inside it, but it’s exactly what she was looking for. She nearly laughs aloud in relief, but has enough good sense to keep it to a delighted grin.

Her guitar is as dusty and abandoned-looking as the rest of this place, but it’s still _her_ guitar. Hand-painted leather strap, crack running through it from where she’d dropped it that one time after being startled by Clancy, slightly bent A-string tuning peg. She slings it over her back, steps back into the hallway, and considers her options.

She’s still considering them when she hears the footsteps on the stairs getting even closer than before. She backs very quickly out of the closet just in time to come face-to-face with the biggest man she’s ever met. He’s almost twice as tall as she is, and the set of his jaw and the way his gaze narrows when he sees her doesn’t promise anything good.

Ruby takes a good look at this extremely imposing man, nods to herself, and then does the only sensible thing she can do in her position – she sprints into the room she was so recently resurrected in, and flings herself directly out of the window.

The _smash_ as she crashes through the glass is kind of awesome, really, and so is the way that she sails through the air as her legs curl up into a reflexive landing position so she can roll with the momentum as she hits the ground, hair streaming out in tangled ribbons with the sudden rush of wind. With the mask she looks superhero-esque. It’s _very_ cool. Although literally everyone whose opinion she’s ever cared about would probably beg to differ.

Ground, impact, roll, spring to feet. Her aching body protests and she’s jarred her arm a bit in a slightly crooked landing, but give her a break – fifteen minutes ago, she was literally dead. A slight dip in her parkour skills is practically nothing.

The note had said _east, ten miles,_ and Ruby would absolutely _love_ to do that, but she has no transport and just flying’s definitely not an option for her anymore. And also no idea which direction is east from where she is.

And also some guy might be trying to kill her? Again? It’s very unclear.

Actually –

She’s at the fence surrounding the house, and now she’s running along the perimeter. She could probably climb it if she wants to, but she doesn’t want to risk it, not carrying her guitar on her back and with the state she’s in. No, she’s _much_ more interested in the front of the house, where – yes! _Yes!_ Big scary mercenary guy had _not_ been wielding a sword, and that most _definitely_ is his car. It’s not a very good or well-maintained car, but the front door’s actually hanging open. And that’s an invitation if Ruby’s ever seen one.

She unstraps her guitar and pushes it through to land with a light _thump_ in the back seat, jumps into the driver’s seat, and slams the door shut behind her. A quick glance to the rearview mirror tells her that Big, Strong and Mean-Looking hasn’t emerged from the house yet – and jeez, from the outside the house is a _wreck._ Nobody’s lived in here in years and half the windows are broken in without Ruby actually having anything to do with it.

She probably has, like, two minutes – three, max – before he comes after her. Two-ish minutes. She can work with that. And there’s no keys in this car, which means it’s time to get _creative._

Now, hotwiring a car with blood magic is probably something that’s generally frowned upon in the magical community. The _probably_ is there because it’s such a wild, unhinged thing to do that nobody’s actually thought to specifically say, ‘hey, Ruby, that’s a really stupidly bad idea and maybe you _shouldn’t be hotwiring a car with blood magic oh Jesus Christ what are you even doing – ’_ – but if literally anyone from Spectrum has here they’d probably be saying that. Exactly that. Depending on who it is saying it, there might even be some swearing thrown in for good measure.

Nobody’s here to swear at her, though, which means that Ruby can run through her ( _extremely_ rudimentary) knowledge of How Automobiles Function and combine that with her (more comprehensive) knowledge of How Powering Arrays Are Constructed, and bite at her palm hard enough to draw blood – “ _AH GOSH DARN IT – OKAY, THIS IS WHY I WANTED TO_ STAY _DEAD_ – ” before smearing a very messy, very shaky, _extremely_ improvised rune on the dashboard.

The car roars like it’s also been resurrected with powerful dark illegal magic, and okay, Ruby’s never actually driven a car before but she’s pretty confident that squirming down so she can properly reach the pedals slamming her foot down on the accelerator is what you’re supposed to do at this point. So that’s what she does – and then it’s out into the flat, featureless desert with the dust kicking up around her and the car groaning in protest. Belatedly, she remembers to throw off the hand brake at the very last minute.

She can just sort-of-see over the dashboard if she squints, and it’s probably not the safest way to do this sort of thing, but you have to take what you can get in this life! It doesn’t look like there’s much to crash into, anyway.

She powers on forwards as fast as she can reasonably convince herself to go until the wrecked house isn’t visible in the dashboard mirror anymore, and then she slows down, fumbling with the brake pedal and pulling the car to an unsteady halt so she can take stock of everything. There’s a few things to cover, so she takes it one step at a time.

One: it seems to be early morning, judging by the low position of the sun in the sky and the flocks of birds lazily coasting around. Which means that all she needs to do is swing around a bit so she’s heading _towards_ the sun and keep going until she gets to Twinford. That’s one problem solved, at least.

Two: the car itself. Ruby pulls at the levers on the seat and readjusts it so she can actually sit in it and reach everything she needs to reach to drive the car. She’s fourteen – wait, is she nineteen now if it’s really been five years? She doesn’t _feel_ nineteen – but either way, her diminutive height is a _curse_ and it’s infuriating and she would like to rip out her own bad genes and give herself a growth spurt just so she can be taller than everyone she knows.

Three: her arm. Ruby adjusts her mask and tugs up her sleeve so she can see her arm properly, and – _ooh boy that’s a nasty-looking curse._ Three long gashes up her shoulder, all extremely deliberate. She prods at one, and it’s bleeding sluggishly – both blood and some serious bad vibes. “Geez louise. _Okay._ This sure is a day I’m having.”

It hits her, suddenly, that she’s _alive._ Alive when she really genuinely had thought that it was _it,_ when the Count’s knife had slid neatly into her chest and she’d torn through his back with a handful of living shadows and they’d both gone plunging off the side of the mountain like so much rotting, hate-filled meat –

She takes off the mask and spends a few minutes sobbing hysterically to herself and also maybe laughing manically a bit too, and then she calms down. The mask goes back on. Repression time.

Finally – her guitar. She grabs it from the back and pulls it into her lap and cradles it in her lap. She’s never polished the darn thing in her life, actually, but she feels the overwhelming need to start doing that now, because _boy_ does it look in desperate need of some TLC.

A tentative strum across the strings reveals that they’re all out of tune. Like, horribly _clashing_ out of4 tune. She winces, and then pushes the guitar into the back seat again. She can deal with that later.

For now – Twinford or bust.

Ruby’s pretty sure that she should be doing stuff with the gearshift to drive the car properly, but she has no idea _how_ that works. So she’s just hoping that the powering rune’s not going to give out, and hoping that BB was right and Twinford really _is_ in this direction, and – she’s hoping a lot of things. She’s not entirely sure what she should be _expecting_ when she gets to town, or what she’s supposed to be doing, but it’s pretty much the only home she’s ever known.

*

The car either runs out of fuel or just gives up on her entirely about half an hour in. It’s disappointing, but not entirely unexpected – it’s not like she’s an expert on powering automobiles with her own blood or anything, or even just _driving_ the dang things.

Thankfully, Twinford is now actually visible in the distance. There’s the mountains to the right, and the ocean behind it, and the familiar sprawling cityscape. Her heart twinges uncomfortably. It doesn’t look _all_ that different, but then again she’s at least a mile or two away and it’s hard to tell without her actual glasses.

She looks down at her bare feet and her bloody, tattered shirt, and winces a bit, because – okay, this isn’t the best look for concealing her identity _or_ walking across a few miles of flatlands.

A quick check through the car reveals a dark brown duster that the big guy had apparently left behind in the trunk. It’s a tiny bit big for her, but she rolls up the sleeves and tears off a good few inches from the hem, and it’s passable enough. Nothing like shoes, though.

She finds a couple of dollars’ worth of loose change in the glovebox as well as a few old-looking scrap pieces of sigil-paper – but that’s it. She shoves it all into the pockets of her new coat anyway, and then spends a few minutes awkwardly tuning her guitar, kind of unsure what she’s doing. It _sounds_ right, but then again it’s not like she’d know if it wasn’t. She’s always been the sort of person to get other people to tune it for her.

And then she gets out of the car and starts walking. The ground is hot and craggy underneath her feet, and she keeps stepping on pebbles and yelping angrily.

She’s worked out what the curse is, incidentally. It’s taken her a good few minutes to hunt it down in the scattered mess of her collective memory of just about every illegal magical technique on the planet, but it’s there – it’s a revenge curse. Specifically, the sort of curse that comes _along_ with a particular sort of resurrection spell; the type that was used to bring her back to life.

With a big, heavy piece of magic]like a _full resurrection,_ of course there’s got to be a big, heavy price to pay, and in this case it looks like Ruby’s going to have to kill someone. One particular person – or her own magical core’s going to eat her from the inside out. Some sort of revenge thing, probably – and BB hadn’t even had the common courtesy to let her know _who_ she’s supposed to be killing.

Rude.

And also painful.

She has no idea if she actually wants to kill anyone over this. She doesn’t know if it’s worth it, not yet.

Ruby works out a sort of plan as she goes, reading over the note that had come with the mask a few more times. The rest of her ‘equipment’ – and she’s going to take that to mean her notes, her inventions, and basically anything else even vaguely magical she’s ever owned or made – are apparently locked up in Spectrum somewhere. If she’s going to have to figure out who this spell wants her to take out – or even how to unravel it without doing _that_ – she’s going to need her notes.

“First things first, steal from Spectrum,” she says out loud. “Well, it’s not like I haven’t done that before.”

The next step is... getting out of Spectrum without being recognized. She really doesn’t want to be recognized, especially if she’s got to go around killing people. She has a feeling not a lot of people are going to be very pleased to see her.

“Let’s be real, they probably threw a party when they realized I was dead,” she tells herself, and laughs humorlessly before biting her lip. “I’ll need somewhere to go – I wonder if they destroyed the Chateau...?”

She decides that getting in and getting out are her top priorities, and finding somewhere to hide out will be the sort of thing that she wildly improvises after that’s all done. Worst comes to worst, she can just find some random scrap of land and paper it with illusions and wards until nobody can tell she’s there.

By the time she gets to the town outer limits, she’s so annoyed and hot and tired that she nearly walks face-first into a fully-powered warding array. She barely notices the poles the sigils are welded to in time, and manages to jump back before she gets knocked out or shocked or cursed or whatever.

A quick glance around reveals that there’s dozens of these sigil-engraved poles, all spaced out at even intervals around the perimeter of Twinford as far as the eye can see.

“I don’t remember these being here,” she mutters, and takes the opportunity to actually look at the town from where she is. She’s come in just at the edge of the industrial district, and from a glance it doesn’t look like _that’s_ changed that much. Maybe a few new factories, but the layout is so familiar she could cry. Beyond the river – again, it’s hard to tell, but it looks... altered.

“Hey, you!” comes a voice from somewhere to her left, and Ruby jolts with sudden adrenaline. She whirls around to see –

Oh, _brother._ She’d recognize that voice anywhere, and that’s not a good thing.


	2. the mortifying ordeal of being unknown. to a bunch of people you practically grew up with and who you know like the back of your hand

Froghorn. Of all people, it _has_ to be Froghorn who’s patrolling the outside limits of town on the day she’s been suddenly and unexpectedly resurrected. Froghorn with his stupid French name and his stupid shiny over-polished sword and his ridiculous endlessly dumb magic array sketching theories that don’t even make any _sense_ has he even _read_ a book on this in his _life -_

Oh no. Her guitar.

See, the last time they’d seen each other they’d been screaming at the top of their respective lungs and being _very very_ antagonistic to each other, and he hadn’t been the one to stab her but the way things were going, he’s probably very upset that he hadn’t got the chance. And she’s wearing a mask, and a coat that she’d never usually be caught dead in, and she’s apparently been dead for five years so he probably won’t _immediately_ think it’s her, but her guitar – her guitar is a dead giveaway.

“Just a second!” Ruby says and throws herself headfirst into the nearest bush. She hears a faint splutter of surprise, and then the sound of footsteps, coming closer. That’s fine, she works better under pressure anyway.

Guitar, off. Coat, buttoned all the way up. Mask, firmly on. Cool. She grabs two scrap of paper out of her pocket, jabs a finger into her still-wounded arm for blood (ouch) and draws up two fast sigils. The first, she slips under her shirt and prods with her knuckles to active it – a blurring, identity-concealing trick. Not her best work but it should keep who she is from becoming _too_ obvious. Hopefully.

The tip of an overly-shiny sword pokes into the bush, just to her right, and she flinches despite herself. “I know you’re there. Word to the wise – next time you go around picking hiding spots, maybe try not jumping into the first bush you see?”

He sounds _so smug._ She wants to punch his stupid face. She folds the second paper scrap into one fist.

“Your boots or your life,” she says, standing up out of the bush, and pointing directly at him.

“What,” says Froghorn, taking a step back.

She can’t help it – she grins. The first hour of being back in the land of the living has been an absolute _chore_ so far, but it might just all be worth it for the simple pleasure of being able to torment Miles Froghorn one more time. “Okay, you got me; I’m probably not going to kill you. But, I still want your boots.”

“You want my _what._ ”

“Boots. You’ve got some very nice boots there – ” It’s true, Froghorn actually has impeccable taste in shoes, despite all his many, many other faults. “ – and if you’ll just direct your eyeline down to my lovely dainty feet, you’ll see that; wow, look at that – I have none. This is a robbery. I’m robbing you. Boots, now.”

“I – you – you – I think you’re misunderstanding something very crucial about how this is supposed to work, little girl!”

Oh, and there’s that familiar old nickname. Her nose wrinkles. It doesn’t look like he’s recognized her. “Little girl? Come on, man, I’m fourteen. Gimme a break.” _Well, sort of._ “And I’m robbing you. Gimme those boots, buster.”

“No,” says Froghorn, “no, you’re not. You’re not robbing anyone. You’re going to tell me who you are, and what you’re doing skulking around the city borders, and why you’re wearing that ridiculous mask. Now.”

“Give me the boots,” Ruby repeats, stubborn.

He hefts his sword. His dumb, _dumb_ sword. “ _No._ Why should I? It’s not like you have any weapon. What was the plan, _annoy_ me into handing all my worldly possessions over to you?”

“Looks can be deceiving, my man.” She holds up one fist. “Last warning. You can just hand the boots right over, and nobody has to get hurt.”

Froghorn blinks at her, consideringly. “I know you’re fourteen, but I think I’m going to stab you.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I thought you’d say,” Ruby agrees, and flicks her fingers outwards. The scrap of paper with the blood-sigil on it goes sailing outwards, nailing him directly in the chest, and he freezes like a statue. Literally freezes; if she’s done her job right, he can’t actually move a muscle right now.

He mutters something incomprehensible and completely furious at her through his frozen-up lips. Ruby just grins at him. “Underestimating me just because I’m short? Spectrum training’s gotten lazy in the last few years.” She walks forward, pats him vaguely on the chest. “Don’t worry, it’ll wear off in, like – half an hour? I don’t know; I didn’t really have time to be specific. Whatever. Enough time for me to steal your stuff.”

His boots are a few sizes too big for her, but honestly, it’s about the principle of the thing more than wearing them for real. Wearing Froghorn’s shoes seems kinda gross. He’s probably got some sort of gross fungal infection. Nope, actually, she’s going to leave the boots where they are.

Instead, she tugs his jacket off and rifles through it, pocketing anything that looks even vaguely interesting or useful. Some more sigil-paper (awesome, you can really never have enough), a compass-shaped device which... is hers. This is one of hers, this belongs to her, she’s _definitely_ stealing that; thank you very much – and a wallet? _Excellent,_ she’ll also be taking that.

She’s just returned his jacket to him (she’s not a _monster_ , and she can vaguely remember him mentioning years ago that he burns easily in the sun, so – natch) when the noise of distant chatter and distant _whoosh whoosh swoop_ reaches her ears, and she turns to see that there’s four people approaching on their swords.

This isn’t an unusual sort of thing, because all mages tend to use their swords to get around. It’s the benefit of being part of a magical organization that both invented and perfected the art of creating flying swords – you get to utilize them in the most ridiculously cool way humanly possible.

Clancy had nicknamed this ‘skateswording’, way back in the day. Ruby had thought this was the peak of comedy, and had immediately gone off to inform all of her coworkers of this great new linguistic development. She had been received with a resounding 98% majority of blank, unimpressed stares, because apparently Blacker was the only person in Spectrum with a functional sense of humor.

Ruby takes a deep breath, and lets it out. _God_ she misses skateswording. But that hasn’t been an option for her for months – well, years –

Anyway.

They’re closer now, and it’s obvious that they’re heading right for her and the still-frozen Froghorn. It’s a crowd of kids. A few years older than she is, actually. They’ve all got swords, and they’re wearing sensible shoes and appropriate monster-fight clothing and – oh, oh _no,_ hang on –

Ruby quickly reaches down into her coat to make sure that her face-blurring charm is still functional, but even the knowledge that it _is_ isn’t quite enough to prevent the sharp stab of bewildered horror that echoes through her entire system.

Four of them. Three girls, one boy. They’re in the vicinity of eighteen-to-nineteen and even though they’ve visibly changed, Ruby still recognizes them instantly as they all screech to a halt right in front of her, staring in visible confusion.

“What are you doing to him?” Del Lasco demands, leaping off her sword and snatching it up into a firm fighter’s grip in one smooth motion. Oh god she’s so tall now. When did she get so tall? Oh, that’s right; probably sometime in the last five years. “Did – did you curse him?”

“Hex,” supplies Mouse softly, who’s hanging back slightly, behind all the others. She’s still pretty short, about as tall as Ruby is right now, but she’s now got some muscle on her too. Her gaze is just as sharp as ever. She seems to be looking between Froghorn and Ruby consideringly. “Freeze hex. I think.”

Elliot clears his through. Oh, Elliot’s tall now. That’s weird. “Any reason why you’re attacking our senior training supervisor?” he asks. And aww, would you look at that, his voice dropped while she was dead! It’s kind of weird and kind of endearing how different he sounds. He could probably sing bass if he wanted – wait. Senior training supervisor?

_Froghorn_ is their _training supervisor_?!

“Attacking? Nah, I was robbing him blind, actually,” Ruby says, hoping her voice isn’t shaking. Repression, repression, repression. Emotional reactions at the sight of her friends, who have all grown up without her? What’s that? “To be fair, he threatened to stab me first, and all I did before that was ask him for his boots and hide in this bush. Totally justified, I say.”

There’s a moment of silence.

“I mean,” says Elliot, lowering his own sword. “Let’s be real, he probably had it coming.”

“ _Elliot,_ ” Red snaps. Red? It sounds like Red, except she’s had a pretty dramatic haircut, and her freckles have somehow become even more pronounced.

“ _What?_ Dude’s an asshole. I can totally believe he’d pull a sword on some random kid.” He points at Ruby with his free hand. “If he tried pulling that on _me_ when I was her age, you’d better believe I’d rob the shit out of him.”

“He can still hear you,” Ruby points out, although now she’s grinning and she’s barely trying hide it. “It’s just a freeze hex; he’s entirely conscious.”

Elliot shrugs, a careless little slope of his shoulders. “What’s he going to do, yell at us _more?_ Give us _worse_ condescending looks?”

“Attaboy, Elliot!” Ruby exclaims, fairly delighted that her Anti-Froghorn Agenda is being carried across to the new generation – next? Same? – of Spectrum mages-in-training. She pauses, and then quickly backpedals. “I mean, I assume your name’s Elliot, that’s what they just called you – plus you seem like an Elliot sort of guy, you dig?”

“Sure am,” he says, and he’s got that bright gleam of joy in his eyes that she knows to mean he likes her already. Elliot’s always been quick to latch onto people, and it’s nicer than nice to see that hasn’t changed. “Which means that you have _my_ name, so care to give us yours?”

“Oh, well, I’m...” says Ruby, but she can’t think of any fake names that aren’t people they’d plausibly already know. And now all she can think about is the letter in her pocket, signed _BB,_ and she swears she _should_ know who those initials stand for, but she can’t focus on puzzles like that and trying to figure out a fake identity at the same time. The two concepts mesh together in her head, and before she can stop herself she says, “Bee.”

“Uh, like the insect?” Elliot guesses, slinging his sword – long, curved, a few pretty but subtle-looking gems embedded in the handle – over his shoulders.

“Sure,” says Ruby. “Sure, let’s go with that. Bee, like the insect.”

“Names, cool,” Del says, and Del hasn’t dropped her sword this entire time. It’d be good form if Ruby was _actually_ planning anything nefarious against them, but as it is, it just kinda stings a bit. “Maybe you actually want to tell us what you’re doing here, though?”

“Come on, Del, she’s just a kid,” Red says, lowering her voice a bit as she glances across. She’s also put her sword down. Actually, Del’s the only one who’s still holding Ruby at swordpoint. Del is the only sensible one here. If Ruby was actually as evil as everyone claimed, she could _destroy_ them right now. “Can’t we go a bit easy on her?”

“A kid who just managed to take out _Froghorn,_ ” Del points out, scowling. “Are you telling me she’s skulking around the town edges, covered in blood for a _non-suspicious_ reason?”

Oh yeah. The blood. She’s not exactly _covered_ in it, but now that she’s thinking about it, it probably looks pretty bad. There’s her cursed arm – it’s soaked through the fabric of her coat sleeve, she can feel the wet stickiness – and her hands are pretty stained-up, too. She suspects there might be some smears of it on her face, from the vision-spell, but it’s hard to tell.

“Don’t worry,” she tells them. “It’s probably mostly mine.”

“Oh, god,” says Red.

The tone of this interaction is starting to change pretty drastically. Ruby kind of wishes they were still holding her at swordpoint.

“Yeah, uh.” And now Elliot is looking a little less amused by the situation and a little more uncomfortable. “Huh. Actually, maybe we should stop pointing swords at her and start getting her to a hospital?”

“Please don’t do that!” Ruby yelps, because – being babied by four of her former best friends in the world is _really_ not how she wanted this encounter to pan out. She’s _fine._ “The blood is completely irrelevant. I tripped, all right?”

“You tripped,” says Mouse.

“I tripped a _lot._ Listen, I’m.. new in town,” she hedges, trying to get her thoughts in order. “– was – ” She is usually _so_ good at lying; the absolute best actually, but right now she’s face-to-face with the grown-up versions of her former friends and that’s distracting enough to make it _very_ hard to concentrate on coming up with something plausible. “ – I’m here from... one of the smaller divisions. Spectrum Three. Arizona. No, shut up, Spectrum Three is _absolutely_ in Arizona,” she adds to Froghorn, who’s started making noises of objection behind her. “Got sent over to investigate some... stuff.”

“Stuff,” says Mouse. She looks unconvinced. Mouse has always had extremely good instincts for people-stuff, so Ruby can’t blame her.

“Resentful energy sort of stuff,” Ruby clarifies, picking up steam. “My ride – my _sword,_ it broke on me a few miles out, so I had to leg it the rest of the way here. I need to talk to LB – ” _Is LB still Head of Spectrum around here? Let’s find out!_ “ – about... a disturbing increase of resentful energy in the area!”

She doesn’t want to talk to LB. Talking to LB is, like, the last thing she wants to do, but what she _does_ need to do is to get into Spectrum somehow. Get in, get her stuff, get out, figure out who she needs to get revenge on for the curse on her arm to fade. Work out if getting revenge for whoever brought her to life is even _worth_ it.

“So why didn’t you come around through the front gates?” Del says, eyes narrowing suspiciously.

“There’s front gates?” Ruby says blankly, and then, “I mean – yeah, of course; I was just heading around to them, but then I got sidetracked by _this_ guy – ” And honestly, it’s very gratifying to see that nobody’s actually moved to take the freeze sigil off Froghorn’s chest. “ – and, well, he’s _your_ mentor, you know how punchable his stupid face is, it’s practically a crime that I _didn’t_ punch him and I just froze him and stole his wallet instead.”

“Huh,” says Mouse, eyes narrowed, and that’s all she says.

Elliot raises a hand. “Uh, Bee, I hate to be _that_ guy, but,” he gestures downwards. “If you were riding into town, what happened to your shoes?”

“Haven’t you ever tried riding barefoot?” Ruby says. She has never tried riding her sword barefoot. She’s not nearly that stupid. But it’s just like improv acting; she’s just got to keep saying _yes, and_ \- and hope she doesn’t end up contradicting herself. “It’s tons of fun. You really – really feel _connected_ with your sword. More than you would if you were wearing shoes. Just got to make sure you don’t cut your feet open on the sharp bit.”

Actually, it _does_ sound pretty fun. She kind of wishes she could try it out.

“Right.” Elliot sounds like he knows she’s bullshitting wildly, but he also sounds like he’s enjoying hearing it quite a lot. “And the mask? Any reason you’re wearing the mask?”

“Masks,” says Ruby with extreme conviction, “are terribly comfortable. I think everyone’s going to be wearing a mask in the future, just wait and see.”

“It’s a pretty mask,” Red offers.

“Thank you,” Ruby says, pleased despite herself.

Froghorn has been making noises of Objection this entire time, which isn’t surprising considering that she’s just paralysed him and is now making small talk with his trainee mages (who, notably, are not doing a _single_ thing to help him up despite their occasional, cautious glances in his direction.

Del says, “Okay, but don’t you think paralysing him was, um, you know – just a _little_ bit overkill?”

“Let’s put it this way,” Ruby says. “Y’all probably know him better than I do. Do you or don’t you want to paralyse him bodily on a near-daily basis?”

Silence and then four reluctant mutters of assent.

“There you go. The only difference between you and me is like, six inches, a sword, and a bit more knowledge of hex sigils.”

“And a mask,” says Red thoughtfully.

“And a mask, sure.”

There’s a prickle of something angry and grim at the edge of her senses, and she flinches automatically, hand going up to the side of her head. Months of working with what most people would consider to be Extremely Bad Illegal Necromancy Magic has given her a second sense for this sort of thing; the kind that most other people don’t have. Something big and bad is coming.

“Were you guys out here for any specific reason?” she asks.

“Just regular patrol,” says Elliot, who is _still_ the sort of person who has no filter whatsoever and will give away government secrets if even vaguely prompted. “It’s a training thing. We can’t get properly certified as mages if we don’t do, like, _ages_ of community service – ”

“No, no, I know that already,” Ruby dismisses, waving a hand. “So there weren’t any, like, reports? Of anything going on out here? Nothing that you were told you had to watch out for?”

“Nothing like that,” says Red slowly. “Why do you ask?”

“I’m only asking because – ”

There is a loud roar that sounds like a million wild animals layered on top of each other. Everybody jumps and startles, even Ruby – and even Froghorn.

“ – because of _that._ ” Ruby turns in the direction of the roar, and squints off into the distance, straining for the vision spell to bring the approaching creature properly into focus. It takes a moment for it to click. “Oh. Huh. You don’t usually see something like _that_ around here.”

It’s like a bear, but if a bear was approximately ten times larger than it really should be, and had glowing eyes and bulging, rippling fur, and also was practically radiating resentment. Enough energy is pouring off it to choke a horse at twenty paces, and it’s making Ruby’s heart pound and the hair on her arms stand on end.

It also happens to be coming directly towards them with the sort of singleminded determined rage that Ruby would usually expect from an angry blonde middle-aged woman who’s convinced that her artisan ham-and-cheese toastie has been put together incorrectly. It’s _bloodthirsty_ intent. This bear’s out to gut a bitch and it doesn’t care what gets destroyed in the process.

“What the fuck is _that,_ ” Mouse breathes.

“That’s a Beast of Bears,” says Ruby, taking a deep breath. “Ever seen one before?”

“ _No,_ ” says Elliot, eyes wide. “Should we have?”

“Nah, probably not! You usually find them further south. They usually need swamp territory to survive – secondary set of gills, see.” She waves a finger in its direction, indicating. “Real big, real angry, _real_ strong. Also, _real_ impervious to any sort of normal magic. It’s the sort of thing that can just... walk through basically any barrier. Nobody knows why.”

“Okay, sure; that’s all well and good,” says Del, grip tightening on her sword. Del has a sword now. Ruby could cry from pride. Del _deserves_ a sword. “But how do we kill it?”

“Uh, you don’t,” Ruby admits. “Usually, it kills you.”

Red looks at the Beast of Bears, and then over at Ruby, and then at the rest of her fellow mages. “What. Are you saying – ”

Ruby shrugs. “Yeah, nobody’s killed a Beast Of Bears, like, ever. Anyone who’s seen one and lived to tell the tale, well, they got really good at running, real fast, let’s just say.” She brightens, remembering something. “Actually, funny story really, most people in the know are actually pretty convinced that there’s only the _one_ of these guys; it just keeps moving from place to place. And we’ve just had one big angry immortal megabear on our hands for the last few centuries. Neat, right?”

“Very neat, Bee, thank you for this new influx of extremely helpful information,” Elliot says, taking a step in front of her. “Quick question – should _we_ be getting really good and running, real fast?”

“No,” she says. “I’m here. It’ll be fine.”

“You’re like, _twelve,_ ” Del says.

“Okay, well, _you’re_ here, and you’re all big strong capable mages who know exactly what they’re doing. Together, we can take it down, easy!” She pauses. “Plus, if we just run away – well, it looks like it’s heading right into Twinford. Remember how I said barriers and normal magic can’t stop it?”

“...Shit,” says Del. “Guys, if she’s right...”

If Ruby’s right, (which she is. She _super_ is) that means that if they don’t do something about it right now, it’s going to go straight through Twinford and wreak absolute havoc on everyone there. Any sort of magical barriers aren’t going to do a _thing_ about it. Ruby watches this information process on everyone else’s faces. They all appear to rapidly be coming to the same conclusion.

“Playtime’s over, kiddo,” says Del. “Take that curse off Froghorn, we’re gonna need him for this.”

“Uh... hm. Now, _about_ that.” Ruby turns back to the bush where her guitar’s contained, and conducts a brief but furious internal debate. She has no idea how things have progressed while she’s been, uh, _gone_ , but she’s hoping that none of them know about the _full_ extent of her whole ‘unhinged, deeply controversial necromancy rampage’ deal. “...No. Mouse, do me a solid and push Froghorn over so he can’t see what I’m about to do.”

Mouse looks at Ruby long and hard with that familiar _analysing and judging this new person_ look of hers. She seems to like what she sees, because she nods and sticks out a leg to kick Froghorn in the back, hard. He falls over onto his face with a muffled sort of _oof._ Half a second passes, and then the half-mumbled protests start up again, this time a lot angrier in tone and with a distinct hint of actual fear to them.

Ruby presses her thumb into her injured arm – hey, it’s basically like a free blood inkwell at this point – and scribbles a deafening sigil onto the back of Froghorn’s shirt, for good measure. There is almost instantly a chorus of protests at this.

“ _You can’t just leave him there!_ He’ll _die!_ ” Elliot says. “I don’t like the guy, but I don’t really feel like becoming an accessory to _murder_ today – ” 

Red says, “Dude, what the f – _heck._ Blood magic? _Blood magic?_ Who’s teaching you?”

“Taught myself.” Ruby dashes over, snatches up her guitar from the bush, and slings it over her shoulder. “I know what I’m doing, man! Calm down!”

The Beast of Bears is now close enough that it’s noticed their presence, and is picking up speed as it lumbers towards them.

Del grimaces, looking between Froghorn (now with a complicated sigil now on his back that Ruby knows from experience is hella tricky to get rid of), and the bear (maybe two minutes away from them), and finally at Ruby herself (all guitar-ed up, giving Del a challenging look).

“What’s the matter?” she says lightly, bouncing on her toes a bit. “Too chicken to take down a Beast of Bears yourself?”

“The moment it even _looks_ like we’re out of our depth,” Del says, with the most flatly no-nonsense tone Ruby’s ever heard from her, “we’re calling for help, and you’re taking that sigil off Froghorn.”

Ruby stops bouncing, and salutes Del solemnly. “Scout’s honor,” she says, neglecting to inform them that she’d been kicked out of the Girl Scouts for a small string of completely non-lethal arson incidents at the tender age of eight.

“Then fine,” says Del. “Let’s do this.”

“Awesome sauce. So what we’re going to need to do here is – ” starts Ruby, habit driving her to take the lead, but Del gets there first.

“Keep it occupied, stop it from reaching any civilians. Approach it from – ” Del gestures, two broad sweeps of the flat of her blade. “ – there and there. It looks like it doesn’t have much side vision, so if we play tagteam with attacking and distractions, it might not be able to land a solid hit on any of us.”

“Um. Yes.” Ruby blinks, wrongfooted. “Yeah, all of that. And hopefully if you keep if on its toes, it won’t notice me coming until I hit it hard enough to kill it.”

“Hm. Yes. Okay. So, to clarify,” says Elliot. “You’re telling us that you can kill the historically unkillable megabear? You? Tiny little midget kid wearing no shoes, a guitar, and a weird mask?”

“In one hit,” Ruby nods.

“Cool, just checking. Your hubris is astounding, by the way.”

“Oh, trust me,” says Ruby. “I’ve earned it.”

“This is stupid and we’re all going to die,” Red mumbles.

“Swords out, folks,” Del orders. “Kid...” She falters. “...Uh, guitar out? I’m assuming that’s some kind of magic guitar. I don’t want to know what the plan is if it’s _not._ ”

Ruby twangs the uppermost string once, and a wave of roiling static echoes through the air around them, causing the hair on the back of her neck to stand on end. “The guitar is _extremely_ magical and I’m offended that you’d think otherwise,” she says.

“ _God_ I hope you know what you’re doing,” Red mutters, but at this point the Beast of Bears is pretty much charging directly at them and there’s not much more time for discussion about it.

Elliot, Del, Mouse and Red raise their swords. Ruby raises her guitar – and begins to play.


	3. how to defeat a historically unkillable megabear with only your magical death guitar and your four former best friends (five steps, with pictures)

Confession time: Ruby can’t actually play the guitar. Well, like, she _sort_ of can; she had a book of chords stashed away somewhere and Red had tried to teach her the basic way back in Grade Three, but she’s never had the patience for actually learning musical instruments.

So back before she’d died; back when everything had Gone Down Like A Lead Balloon and she’d had to rapidly switch from _normal magic with a cool sword_ to _less normal magic ft. dead people and the screams of the damned,_ she hadn’t had much time to think about what she was planning on channelling that Less Normal Magic through. There hadn’t been a lot of things on hand, at the time. Grabbing a long-forgotten guitar out of the attic of her house had seemed reasonable enough, and then it had kind of become Her Thing, and there was no going back from that.

It’s less about music and more about _intent,_ which is a shame. Ruby’s pretty sure that her death magic duels would be a million more times cooler if she was actually playing properly.

The others – the _actual_ mages, the ones who have magical cores and apprenticeships and the ability to actually fight with a sword, all four of them – are already moving to flank the Beast of Bears. They’re going about it kind of uncertainly, but it also looks a lot like the sort of thing that they’ve done many, many times before. They know how to work as a team.

Red takes point, coming in with a hard, strong swing against the bear’s right side and dancing backwards elegantly to avoid the swipe it takes in her direction. Mouse shifts her weight to one side, and grabs what looks like a combustion sigil from the inside of her jacket before sending it forward with one clear flick of her wrist. It would be a good move if the Beast of Bears wasn’t immune to literally any sort of regular magic – as it is, it only explodes uselessly against the bear’s fur. At least it distracts it.

Elliot and Del are alternating at taking wild, pretty much entirely useless swipes at any part of the bear that’s within range – mainly the legs and lower body. It’s not hurting it, not majorly, but all of this means that the Beast of Bears is occupied with _them_ and not paying any attention. Which means it’s time for Ruby to stop analysing her former classmates’ fighting styles (with some amount of delighted pride but also some amount of confused sort-of-maybe regret at never having got to do this when they were all the same age) and get to work with being the MVP on this impromptu magical team.

She curls her hands into a clumsy E-minor chord and slams a hand three times against the fretboard before dashing forwards and strumming _down,_ drawing as much resentful energy as she can from the world around her as she does. There’s a lot to work from, surprisingly. The Beast of Bears itself seems to be almost entirely made of it, and there’s plenty of residual energy hovering around the outskirts of the town, kept out by sigils and barriers. It curls upwards, swirling around her, whispering grim promises and running indistinct fingers up-and-down her spine.

It’s a familiar sensation that’s equal parts wonderful and nauseating.

Ruby noodles around with her left hand for a moment or two before she finds a note on the lowest string that sound suitably angry and ominous. And she starts plucking at it, resonating the resentment around her into waves and coils. Ready for attack.

“Everybody out of the way!” she calls, raising one hand into the air. Everybody looks back at her, and there’s a moment where Del’s eyes widen and Mouse pales and Elliot and Red let out identical sounding little _eeps_ of shock – and then they scatter, throwing themselves as far to the side as they possibly can.

...Ruby realizes that she must look pretty horrifyingly powerful right now. The resentful energy tends to drain the color from her face and make her eyes glow, and her hair kind of floats freely around her, and she might also be levitating a tiny bit right now. Plus, there’s the little thing about necromantic magic being outright _banned_ and called Evil and Life-Destroying and Detrimental To Your Body, Mind And Soul – okay, good, they’re all clear, time to let those demonic screams of death and destruction _rip._

Her hand comes down, and the strings flash with intense vibration, and all of the coiled-up resentment and bitterness swirling around her is directed forward in one compressed, insanely focused blast. It goes right towards the Beast of Bears just as it’s rearing up to attack Del with one mighty paw, and catches it directly in the chest.

There’s a moment where Ruby’s halfway convinced that it hadn’t worked – but then the Beast of Bears shatters.

There’s no better way to put it. It just – _explodes_ outwards into millions of furry, chunky fragments. This is gross, but it’s also good, and it’s pretty much what Ruby had been hoping for. She lands on the ground lightly, grinning, as the rest of the impromptu bear-murder team lets out delighted cheers of triumph.

And then her grin slides off her face, and everyone stops cheering very quickly.

Because unfortunately, the bear exploding reveals something new and unnerving and... pretty bad. Apparently there had been something _inside_ the bear, something holding it together – and that something appears to be pure resentful energy.

Ruby is momentarily stunned, hand falling flat and limp on the strings.

The black, viscous strands of what was formerly a really _really_ big bear with a mean streak a mile wide are now circling outwards to surround them, and almost immediately one of them lunges forwards to latch at Red’s throat, apparently intent on throttling the life out of her. Red lets out a strangled scream, twists, and kicks her way out of the hold.

Almost as if the rest of the resentful energy was just waiting for its cue to begin attacking, everything’s in motion at once. Everybody’s working frantically to beat this new, unexpected opponent backwards, and the mood has gone from ‘mildly afraid but still determined’ to ‘completely panicked, oh god we’re all going to die’.

“What was the _plan,_ kid?” Del yells, slashing furiously away at the nearest tendril of dark hate-powered energy, which seems to be content on flaying her alive.

“I thought I could just hit it really _really_ hard and it’d die!” Ruby yells back, now furiously plucking at the strings in an attempt to get the energy that’s currently attacking them under control. “I didn’t think it’d explore into bear goo that _wants to kill us even more than the original bear did!_ ”

It’s not working – she can’t control it, not enough to make it _stop._ Maybe she’s just running on fumes and is too exhausted to get it reigned in, or maybe it’s because this bear has been accumulating bad vibes for a _very_ long time and it’s too potent a mixture for even Ruby to grab at, or maybe it’s a mixture of those two things – or something else entirely. Whatever the reason, trying to prise the dark strands back is like trying to stop the tide from rising – so Ruby switches to a different avenue of attack.

Resentful energy versus resentful energy is no good. It’s almost exactly like trying to fight fire with more fire – all you end up is with a burnt-down house and major first-degree burns. Ruby’s fingers are now working up and down in a very particular pattern that she hasn’t used for a while now. She’s calling for help. Any help. Any spirits or creatures or _anything_ within range that might be able to join their side of attack.

And all the while, Ruby twists and pivots, dodging every angry attack that comes her way like it hasn’t been five years of being extremely dead since she’s last done it. It’s like riding a bike – you just don’t forget how to fight at full power in an unexpected, intense necromancy battle, apparently. The others are doing pretty well, especially considering that they (probably) haven’t been in a situation like this before. Which is to say, the tide of the battle’s turning slowly against them, but at least they’re losing with _style._

Ruby catches sight of Froghorn on the ground and lets out an unholy noise of frustration before jumping and bounding over to defend him. She doesn’t feel like getting the guy killed, no matter what her personal grievances with him are, and she _is_ the one who put him in this position in the first place, anyway.

She half-considers interrupting the sigil and letting up him because – yeah, they really _do_ need some help, actually, they’re getting their asses kicked – but then she feels a tug at her energy. Something’s answering her call for help. She’s extremely excited for a moment, but then she turns in the direction of the tug and her entire world crumbles in on itself.

And it seems like the others have noticed the arrival too.

“ _OKAY THAT IS A ZOMBIE THING. THAT KID JUST SUMMONED A ZOMBIE THING. WE ARE SO FUCKED RIGHT NOW, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO IF LB EVER FINDS OUT WE WERE WORKING WITH A MIDGET NECROMANCER?_ ”

Ruby is having several hundred very small crises all at once right now and Elliot’s high-pitched shrieking sure isn’t helping matters. Because she can’t see him properly, not _really_ , her mask isn’t good enough to make out details from this far away, but she could have _sworn_ that the diminutive figure currently bearing down on the resentful strands from behind is –

He should be _dead._

But then again – so should she.

Which doesn’t explain why Clancy Crew looks so ashen and washed-out, or why he’s moving like a – well, a zombie thing, or why he doesn’t appear to recognize her or any of the rest of them, at _all._ There’s something seriously wrong going on here, but she doesn’t have time to process what it is.

For a moment, Ruby is torn between the two distinct thoughts of ‘if I make him go away, we’re all gonna die’ and ‘if I _don’t_ make him go away, they’re gonna kill _him_ ’, and after a minute the second thought wins out, and she starts strumming frantically and angrily in the makeshift key of ‘GET OUT OF HERE, GET OUT OF HERE _NOW_ ’, hoping that she can still get through to him even in whatever sort of state he’s in.

There’s a moment where he doesn’t seem to hear her, he just keeps coming. But then he stops dead in his tracks, and his neck swivels slowly until he’s looking directly at her.

Clancy’s eyes are milky white and unseeing. Ruby’s heart tightens painfully, and she plays harder. She wishes she knew how to make it sound right – make it sound like she’s _actually_ trying to tell him ‘go away, I miss you and I love you but you _need_ to go away or things are going to go bad, fast’ and not like she’s trying to strangle several angry cats at once.

But she doesn’t know how to do that. All she knows is how to do the cat-strangling thing.

She’s really good at the visuals of being an evil necromancer, and not so great at the mood music. It’s a problem she needs to work on.

It seems to work, though, because Clancy blinks once and for a second something close to an actual emotion seems to flash across his face – and then turns and he’s running, and – okay. Her apparently-alive, super-zombified best friend is gone, running off to the mountains – that’s good, that’s one thing she doesn’t need to worry about. It doesn’t look like anybody else recognized him, which is... another good thing! A lot of good things are happening.

Here’s a not-good thing – they’re still being viciously attacked by a whole load of angry magical energy intent on ripping them apart limb-from-limb, and Ruby has absolutely no idea how to stop it.

“Did – did you just _get rid_ of the zombie thing that you summoned specifically to help us fight _this_ thing?” wheezes Red, retreating to join Ruby over Froghorn’s body. She wheels around to guard Ruby’s back, swiping left and right and centre with her sword.

“Yeah,” says Ruby, too busy shredding frantically in the key of something-or-other-minor to elaborate further.

“ _WHY._ ”

Ruby freezes briefly, and tries to think of a good response to this. “Uhh... wrong number?”

Del joins them, to Ruby’s left. “Cool! Cool-cool-cool! Well, I’m glad you hung up on your musical zombie buttdial just because it wasn’t the _right_ sort of zombie to help us out, but what’s the plan _now?_ Do you even have a plan? Any more bright ideas, since we’re apparently all trusting a _child_ to save our collective asses?”

“Um, give me a minute,” Ruby says, trying to think of a new plan or at the very least a way for all of them to get out of this alive and un-maimed.

“Fuck that!” Elliot screams from several metres away. “Send the signal! Send the signal!”

“What signal? Who are you sending a signal to?” Ruby demands, eyes widening, but her words are lost in the rush of panic and sword clanging and after a second of no response she can’t afford not to start playing again.

As she does, she sees Mouse dance backwards into a pocket of relative calm, and reach into her jacket pocket to pull out another scrap of ink-covered paper, which she tears in half. A shower of bright multicolored sparks shoot straight upwards, exploding into a swirling rainbow pattern that hangs in the sky above them, illuminating the midday scene with strange shades and shadows.

Ruby’s first instinct is to run – because whoever it is that they’ve just signalled, there’s approximately a ninety percent chance that she does _not_ want to be here when they arrive. But also, she’s pretty sure she’s the only thing standing between their ragtag party and death-by-former-bear. And even though nobody here recognizes her, she still loves them and cares about them and would probably die for them – oh, wait, no. She actually _did_ die for them, didn’t she? So scratch that, she’d definitely die for them, and she’d do it again in a heartbeat.

So she’s playing, and inventing new discordant screeches of chords and trying to find _new_ ways of plucking the strings on the fly so she can work out how to get _rid_ of hundreds and hundreds of years’ worth of bear-flavored resentment. She’s keeping one eye on everyone else just in case she had to throw herself in between them and Certain Death, and really it’s all very stressful. So she can’t be blamed for not noticing the new music for nearly a full minute after it arrives.

For a second, she thinks what she’s hearing is another one of those things-that-aren’t-there. Auditory hallucinations. Because she couldn’t possibly be hearing _actual_ music in the middle of her atonal, cacophonic, punk necromancy guitar solo. Not actual music that actually sounds nice, played by someone who knows what they’re doing.

It sounds... like a clarinet.

As this thought registers, Ruby’s fingers freeze on the strings, resentful energy falling away from her like water evaporating off a hot stove.

“You... have _got_ to be kidding me,” she says, throat suddenly very _very_ dry, and heart now pounding at approximately infinity miles an hour.

Nobody hears her, because the rest of the assembled group has let out cheers of relief and excitement. And, oh, so _that’s_ who the signal was for. Great! Just her luck.

There’s a flurry of wind-instrument-type notes, and a pulse of energy shoots out to drive the darkness back.

It’s unfair how much better he sounds compared to her. Clarinet isn’t _supposed_ to sound good. It’s reedy and scratchy and sounds like someone performing MMA on a squeaky chicken.

But also, she’s really bad at guitar, so maybe it isn’t all that surprising. She really should have actually learned to play her magic spirit instrument properly when she had the chance.

Several more blasts of piping melody and energy-streaks follow, driving the tendrils of darkness back all the way to the horizon, and then the dust settles and everything, for the first time in several minutes, is silent.

And Ruby looks up to meets Hitch’s gaze through the eyeholes of her mask.

She doesn’t expect him to recognize her instantly – she’s five years younger than she logically should be, she’s wearing a mask, she’s got an identity-concealing spell blurring the finer details of who she is – but she can see it in his eyes the _moment_ he gets a proper look at her. He knows. She doesn’t know if it’s because of the guitar and the frankly terrible necromantic music, or if it’s something else entirely, but he _recognizes_ her.

He lowers his clarinet slowly.

The expression on his face really is _something,_ but it’s also impossible to read, apart from clear shock. She doesn’t know what he’s thinking, only that he appears to be experiencing some kind of Very Strong Emotion.

She sees him take a breath and open his mouth, clearly about to say something, but then angry dark energy grabs her by the hair and yanks her sharply backwards to the ground. Her guitar collides with the dirt, making it ring hollowly, and her vision goes white for a moment. And then she’s being hauled backwards into a maelstrom of seething tendrils, and she’s struggling to get her fingers to the strings again. There’s a pause, and a few scattered yells of alarm, and then the clarinet picks up once again.

She curses and yells angry threats at the resentful energy that has her by the hair, all the while scrambling around blindly to find a note that will resonate correctly with the ones that are playing. She finds it, and strums at it so fiercely she’s halfway convinced she’s going to break the string. The darkness recoils, and she twirls herself around, pivoting on her own energy to face it properly.

Resentful energy on its own might not be enough, but a duet with _proper_ magical intent...

She takes the lead, because she wouldn’t know how to play along with Hitch’s clarinet-ing if she _tried._ She starts strumming, rearranging her fingers until she finds a chord that actually sounds like something you’d hear in regular, conventional music. It sounds major in tone, with a shift of notes at the top that gives it a slightly eerie feel.

There’s a second or two of hesitation, and then the piping, slightly nasal clarinet melody sweeps in to compliment it. She feels her hair standing on end. She’s not sure if it’s because of the music or not.

The bright warmth of the magical energy flows and twines through her own wisps of blood and darkness, and together it begins to smother any trace of bear-flavored resentment, pushing it back and compressing it into a single, confined space. Hitch yells something she can’t hear over the blood roaring in her ears and then drops one hand from the clarinet briefly to toss a glowing bag to one side. Elliot catches it, and wrenches it open, and flings his arms out as the resentment begins to flow into it like water swirling down a drain. Ah, the good old containment bags, Ruby’s missed those.

She changes tune, doing her best to direct the resentment and funnel it in the right direction. It seems to be doing _something_ , at the very least. And it’s not trying to attack them anymore.

“Stop on the count of three!” Hitch calls, loud and clear through the chaos. “One, two – ”

On his mark, Ruby jumps backwards, tugging her hands away from the strings and letting the notes ring off into nothing. At the same time, Elliot snaps the bag shut, trapping the last of the resentment within – and then everything is silent.

Just like that, every last trace of the Beast of Bears is gone, contained and blocked away. It feels anticlimactic, and suddenly Ruby feels more than a little ridiculous, standing there with a guitar in her bloody hands, staring at a bag with wary trepidation.

After a second, Elliot says, “All right! I think we got it!”

“Let Mouse double the protection charm, just in case,” Hitch says, but he isn’t really paying attention to any of them. He tucks away his clarinet in one magically-extended pocket, but he doesn’t look away from Ruby once.

Ruby, for her part, isn’t sure if she would be able to run fast enough to get away from this situation in time, because the adrenaline rush from the whole fighting thing is starting to wear off, and she’s feeling more than a little bit shaky, all things considered. She settles for taking one single, wobbly step backwards and laughing nervously. “Uh – ”

“We didn’t know she was a necromancer!” Red exclaims loudly.

“Look, we can explain,” fumbles Del unconvincingly, glancing rapidly between Hitch and Ruby. “You see, there was this whole thing, we ran into this kid out here, her name’s – ”

“Ruby,” says Hitch.

“What?” Red blinks. “No, that’s... no? She said her name’s Bee, and she told us that she’s – ”

“She’s a liar, is what she is,” says Hitch, and Ruby feels her blood freeze over.

“Wait, you know her?” Elliot demands, looking up from the bag that Mouse is now drawing extra sigils all over.

Hitch momentarily looks extremely puzzled, until his face clears. “Identity-concealment charm?”

Ruby does weak fingerguns at him to hide her outright terror. “Uh huh. Never quite managed to fool you with that one, huh?”

This seems to confirm it for him, because his expression fractures into something unreadable and utterly raw. “Kid – ” he says. “ – _Ruby._ How the hell – what – where – are you – ”

Ruby manages a grin. It feels incredibly unconvincing, and she’s about to say something extremely witty and reassuring that’ll let him know that he can just go away and leave her alone and he doesn’t need to worry about anything, and he doesn’t even need to _think_ about her anymore – but then she realizes that there’s black clouding her vision at the corners. And it’s not the resentful-energy kind of black clouding.

“Oh,” she says, “huh.” She frowns. “Think I might have used a bit too much blood in all that blood magic,” she admits, and then pitches sideways, legs buckling underneath her.

She expects a hard, painful impact with the ground, but someone catches her before she can get anywhere near it – an arm swooping around her shoulders and lowering her gently down. She blinks up at the sky through her mask, confused.

“Hey there,” Hitch says. There’s a worried crease pinched between his eyebrows, and she stares up at his face, uncomprehending.

“Kinda figured you’d want to kill me at this point,” she admits.

She hears distant yelling; recognizes one of the voices as Froghorn’s and the rest as – those other people, the ones with the swords. You know, her friends. Former friends? Is it ‘former friends’ if they didn’t ever really _stop_ being friends with her and she just vanished off the grid to become a vigilante necromancer and then died horribly without them ever finding out about it?

That’s a bit too much for her blood-deprived brain to properly consider right now, so she just lets her head loll back and her fingers slip away from the frets of her guitar,

“Mind the guitar,” she mutters, barely conscious.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve gotcha, kiddo.”

Ruby coughs, and tastes blood. That’s not good. That’s blood where it isn’t supposed to be. “Is this – is this one of those ‘gotchas’ where you’re planning on dragging me off to Magic Jail for my Numerous Necromancy Crimes and locking me up forever – ”

“Stop talking before you kill yourself,” says Hitch, “ _again._ No, I’m not dragging you off to Magic Jail for Necromancy Crimes, and I never was. I’m relieved to see you again. I’m – I missed you. I’ve felt _insanely_ guilty for the last five years for not being able to save you, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to fuck it up now that I’ve got a second chance, if you’ll pardon my language.”

“Oh,” says Ruby, “okay, cool,” and she promptly passes out, leaving everyone to deal with the aftermath without her.


	4. interlude: in which blacker has a crisis about loyalty and dumbass teenage girls and necromancy, expressed entirely through a continuous informative monologue

Uh, how did Ruby Redfort die? Funny story, actually – no, on second thoughts, maybe it isn’t so funny after all. It _is_ a bit of a long story, though, and she’s not going to be unconscious forever, so we should hurry up and tell this story pretty quickly. All right.

It all starts – well, to be perfectly honest, it started a long time ago, really, before Ruby was even born. But for the sake of being clear and succinct, let’s say it starts properly when Carla Lopez is murdered right in the middle of Chatterbird Square, choking and gasping for a last breath of air that never comes. Nobody in Spectrum can decipher the array that was used to kill her, the one etched delicately in the cobblestones on the path she used to shortcut her way into work every morning.

To reiterate: nobody in _Spectrum._ The most ancient, powerful and well-established community of mages in the _country._ So of course they hire a thirteen year old girl to do their job for them.

Magical training starts at fifteen, at the earlier, because that’s the age when your magical core starts forming – and that’s iffy territory as it is. Honestly, most people don’t get a sword and training until they’re eighteen, because magical stuff like this is just too dangerous for most parents to risk their kids on. But apparently they’re desperate, and apparently Ruby is the most qualified person for the job, _somehow,_ so in she goes to work.

Not for _proper_ training, it must be stressed – no, they only ever wanted her to help out with unwinding the spell arrays. Ruby has a natural talent for that sort of thing. The sigils and patterns just seem to fall away underneath her fingers, and in less than a week, she and I are working together on deconstructing and reconstructing spell patterns like we’ve been doing it for years.

So that’s all well and good until Ruby actually solves the array, and finds herself in the middle of a whole conspiracy to steal some important magical artefact. A lot of shit goes down. She gets trapped in a giant hourglass by one of the most feared practitioners of demonic magic of all time, it’s a _really_ long story and Hitch knows more about it than I do, go ask him. It’s not even a painful sort of story, so he might actually tell you it.

She survives – yeah, she doesn’t die at this point in the story, stay with me – and she’s a reckless teen girl so of course she wants to keep on doing what she’s doing, because it’s an adventurous sort of thing to do, and what kind of young girl _doesn’t_ want adventure and intrigue in her life?

So Ruby stays on the team, and keeps working with me, and we get along like several houses quickly and consecutively set ablaze. The same can’t really be said for Miles Froghorn, the _other_ person assigned to the array-decoding case, but then again – you probably could have guessed that. To say they’re at each other’s throats would be the understatement of the century. Froghorn is furious that they hired a _thirteen-year-old,_ as if he can’t do his own damn job, and Ruby interprets this anger at Spectrum as anger at _her,_ and then it actually becomes anger at her, and – well, it’s a mess. But it’s a tolerable mess, because although they’re vitriolic coworkers, they _are_ still coworkers, and I thought I managed to do a pretty good job of keeping the peace. But apparently not.

And I really should mention at this point that there’s, like, an obscene amount of weird, wild adventures going on in the background. All of them featuring Ruby. Because Ruby’s just like that, she gets all up in the most buckwild plots this state has to offer like they’re magnets and she’s another, stronger, magnet. And they’re weird and wild even by our standards. Something with an ancient sea monster, something with a dire wolf or whatever it even _was –_ a lot of animals, really. That might have been the kickstart for her interest in magical creatures, or maybe that was just... necessity.

Anyway.

I’m just going to assume that all of you already know about how LB’s magical core got ripped out and then got replaced and nobody ever talked about _how_ or _why_ ever again, because – yeah, because that’s pretty common gossip knowledge around here. You know what I’m talking about. It’s only really worth bringing up because it’s around that point that Ruby disappears. Straight-up disappears for a few weeks (you remember that? Huh, I didn’t think anyone would, with everything else that went down – oh, never mind) and everyone’s _panicking –_ especially Hitch, it should be noted, I’m not sure if you remember _that_ bit of this whole thing. And then she just... comes back. She’s not using her sword anymore, and gained a guitar that she literally carries _everywhere_ with her, and maybe she seems a bit strange but everyone’s happy enough to see her that they don’t worry about it all that much.

Maybe we should’ve worried.

Does it seem like we’re moving a bit too quickly through this story? Yeah, sorry about that. It’s just, there’s a _lot_ of things that went down five years ago, and giving the full story in full detail would take... a while. Like, if this were a television show, it would be a full thirty episodes of flashback material, and we just don’t have time for that sort of thing. So I’m just kind of giving you the quick and dirty details. Hang on, so I covered the whole thing with the Count and – so where was –

Ah, right. Well, here’s where things start getting a bit less-than-great. I’m sure you all remember the whole mess with Spectrum’s personal rogues gallery laying siege to Twinford, yeah? It’s the reason why we’ve got all the wards on the outskirts of the town, and why we force you to go on patrol basically every day. Safety measures, because, and I cannot stress this enough, that whole thing was a _huge_ mess. And I’m sure you can remember a lot of your classmates, uh –

Died, yeah. There was no way to put that tactfully. The Australian and Lorelei Von Leyden – there’s really not a kind way to say ‘legitimate psychopaths’, but that’s really what they were. So. Here comes a bit that you’re going to get mad at me for only telling you _now_ , but in my defence, LB was very, _very_ clear on not letting it slip. But hey, extenuating circumstances – what’s she going to do, fire me?

You all got told that both Clancy Crew and Ruby Redfort died in the siege, but – uh, that’s not _really_ the truth. Not the full truth. I mean, Clancy did die, but –

Let me try this again.

So, Lorelei got a hold of Clancy, and from what I heard, she _sort_ of killed him, but – not... really? I’m an array expert, not a necromancy expert, unfortunately. I’ve read Ruby’s notes, but it never really clicked with me, not properly. I think the general gist was, like – his soul had been torn out of his body and that half-killed him, but it wasn’t a _permanent-_ permanent sort of death? Not sure. Anyway, at _that_ point, Ruby getting angry equalled Ruby getting powerful. _Really_ powerful. Powerful enough to pull off a stunt that was literally unprecedented – bringing a corpse to life. And not just normal necromantic resurrection, where they’re basically like puppets – no, she actually brought his consciousness back too.

This was Spectrum’s first actual exposure to, uh. Ruby doing the whole ‘illegal necromancy’ thing. Like, _properly._ They knew she was messing around with some less-than-conventional magical methods, but most people assumed that it was just her playing around and not _really_ doing anything properly dangerous. Me included, I should point out. But performing a big showy angry resurrection and immediately lashing out and murdering both people involved in her best friend’s death, well, that _did_ turn some heads.

...She was _fourteen._ They shouldn’t have come down on her that hard, I said so at the time, it was just _cruel_ – but, they were scared. LB lashed out, and she had the whole of Spectrum behind her with the whole lashing-out thing, and – Ruby grabbed Clancy and ran for the mountains.

Y’know the Mountain Chateau? That place where we don’t let you guys go, ever, under pain of eternal punishment and damnation and helping Doctor Harper with sorting medical samples for three weeks straight? There’s two reasons you aren’t allowed there. The first is because it’s insanely dangerous, there is _so_ much resentment hanging around there and that’s not even mentioning all of the experiments Ruby ran while she was staying there. The second is that it’s extremely obvious that Ruby was staying there, and I think LB was afraid you’d figure it out, because you’re all smart kids.

She and Clancy stayed there for... it must have been _months._ They shored up the defences and tamed all the wild animals left there by the previous owner, because... yeah, it used to be a kind of magical creature hotspot. Just a girl, her best friend, and sixty-or-so incredibly loyal demonic animals.

I never visited them up there. I think – I think I should have. LB mounted a couple of attacks. Well, I say _attacks,_ they were more like sieges. But I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this lately, but Ruby was – _is_ – extremely clever when it comes to arrays and sigils and, horrifyingly, resurrecting long-dead corpses to come to her aid. So nobody ever really got in, not apart from Hitch, that one time – but, as I heard it, that ended with an argument and also Hitch getting stabbed. So.

Yeah, yeah, I’m getting to the dying part. I _said_ it was a long story.

I wasn’t there, so I can only give you a second-hand account, but from what I heard, it was just... a _really_ bad coincidence. Spectrum and an unrelated, extremely evil party – the Count; it was the Count, you remember that guy? – decided to lay siege to the Mountain Chateau at the same time.

Froghorn had got some sort of horrible curse laid on him, and everyone had got it into their minds that _Ruby_ was the one that did it, and rather than denying it outright, she got all defensive and – well, cue an absolute clusterfuck. Don’t tell anyone I used the word ‘clusterfuck’, I don’t want to get in trouble, I’m supposed to be the responsible one. Most of the Spectrum staff were trying to contain the metric ton of magical animals she’d managed to smuggle up there, but she was up on the roof and – a whole magical duel thing happened. Flashing lights, roaring, the whole shebang, 

When they got there, she was very, very obviously dead, and so was the Count, and we have next to no idea how it happened, because the moment anyone laid eyes on their bodies, they both went up in flames. Some kind of automatic defence mechanism, I don’t know. They ran a couple of seances to try to contact Ruby’s spirit, but there was no real response – I guess she must have been destroyed too thoroughly for that to have actually worked.

So they quarantined up the Chateau, suppressed all the magical creatures and experiments, including the... sentient ones. And they – they got rid of Clancy Crew’s body.

Yeah. Yeah, no, you’re right, it wasn’t – it was _not_ the right thing to do. I’m not condoning it. I think it’s stupid, think it’s borderline _evil_ actually, but what am I supposed to do?

What else is there to say, really? They covered up her death, her parents moved out of town, because – _yeah –_ and we all just moved on with our lives. It was a rough couple of years. Hitch got demoted; had to work his way back to senior position, and we had to recruit some new juniors to make up for all the people we’d lost at the time – that’s you, by the way – but that’s about it.

Any questions?

No, I have no idea why she’s suddenly alive. Nobody’s told me _anything._ If I were a man of action, I’d be getting very, very angry about that, because – well, I’ve missed her, can you tell? But I’m not. I am a very calm and very chill sorta guy. This is fine. This is fine. This is –

This isn’t fine. But I’m dealing. I’m sure you guys are dealing too, right? Yeah. Hmm, why did she pass out?

Because she has no self preservation instincts, that’s why.

No, okay, that _is_ a bit unfair. She passed out because she used all of her mental and physical energy summoning the legions of the dead to assist her in killing the mother of all demon bears, and I have it on pretty good authority that doing that isn’t great for her health. Also, she apparently kept stabbing herself so she could have blood for blood magic sigils, which... is _also_ not great for your health. I don’t think I have to remind you guys never to do that, ever.

Why was she hiding who she was? Well, she – that – that’s a question for her, probably. Uh. I haven’t seen her in five years, no one has, she was _dead,_ but – if I had to _guess –_

She’s afraid.

Not just of Spectrum and the rest, she’s afraid specifically of _us._ And honestly, I don’t know if I can blame her.

I –

I’ve got some things that I’ve gotta do – no, I’m not going to visit her. I don’t even know where they _are_ right now. No, what I _am_ doing is running interference with LB, because – again, I shouldn’t have to say this – she can’t know that Ruby’s back.

Look – ah, I’ve got to run. Have any of you seen Bradley around...? If anyone’s going to be able to help with this, it’s him – no?

I’ll check down in Green, then. Remember, keep it zipped.


	5. trauma! in your magic clarinet dad’s nondescript apartment

Ruby wakes slowly to a still, dark room and a faint, extremely familiar sound that she can’t quite place coming from a few rooms over. She rests there for a moment or two – not doing anything, just luxuriating in the feeling of _still_ being alive and not having to run for her life immediately upon waking up.

She remembers what had happened vaguely. But the vague bits are still pretty clear in her mind – aw man, had she actually _fainted?_ There’s nothing more embarrassing than that, there really isn’t. She’d actually done the whole ‘swooning and passing out from sheer bloodloss’ thing. _That’s_ not going to be great for her image as a terrifying unstoppable necromancer.

_Froghorn_ was there. He witnessed that. He witnessed her fainting. God. She’s never going to live this down.

She blinks up at the ceiling, and it’s blurry and out of focus. No glasses. Hm. The bed feels too big for her, and also far too neat and pristine considering that – she licks her lips experimentally to check, and yes – she’s still kind of covered in blood. It’s one of those big queen-sized beds with luxurious soft blankets and a lot of pillows piled up at the headboard.

As she sits up, curling her legs underneath her, she notices that her arm, the cursed one – it’s bandaged up neatly. Like, it’s still bleeding, but at least the bleeding isn’t going to get everywhere, and she might not actually die of it.

Ruby looks over, and the vague shape of her guitar is propped up on its side, flush with the wall. There’s a chair pulled up right at the bedside that’s unoccupied, but as far as she can tell, her stolen jacket is folded neatly on it with her mask on top. She makes a grab for the mask, and manages it second try. She pulls it over her eyes and is relieved to find that the vision charm is still active.

She takes stock of herself briefly. Rule fifteen, again. She’s getting a lot of mileage out of that one, maybe she should reorder the list and bump that one up a bit higher. She feels fine, actually – not, like, _perfectly_ well and healthy, her shoulder still stings and there’s the whole _blood all over her_ thing, but at least she can try to stand up.

She swings her legs over the edge of the bed and tries to stand up. Her vision swims, and she’s briefly extremely dizzy, but she waits it out and when she’s feeling steadier, goes to grab the jacket. She pulls out everything from the pockets – sigil-paper, small amount of money, note from ‘BB’ – and transfers it to her jeans, and then goes looking around the room.

There’s a small slide-out cupboard that just has about twenty identical suits hanging in it, which solves the question of ‘whose room is this’ pretty neatly. There’s also not very much else. It’s a spare sort of room – clean and tidy, but ultimately impersonal. The sole window looks out onto some sort of back alley.

But the faint, familiar sound is still audible, and with all this information at her disposal, it’s not hard to work out what it is.

She pushes open the door, and cautiously works her way through the small apartment until she comes to where the sound of the clarinet is coming from. It’s a familiar sort of song – one of the old healing ones, she thinks. She doesn’t know _exactly;_ traditional healing magic had never really been something she’d ever had time for.

The living room she ends up in is just about as sparse and minimal as the bedroom had been.

Hitch is sitting on a couch near one of the front windows, looking out on the mid-morning scene of what Ruby recognizes as Chatterbird Square as he plays. It’s a familiar sight, although the location is new. This isn’t his flat, but then again – it wouldn’t be, would it? Because _his_ flat had been in her house, and when she’d died –

“Hey,” says Ruby.

The clarinet stops.

“Hello,” says Hitch.

Ruby pokes a hand through the hole in the front of her shirt, fiddling with the fabric. “Thanks for not turning me into LB or whoever,” she says lamely. “I – uh...”

As she’s fumbling for things to say, Hitch turns around and looks at her. He doesn’t look _angry,_ not really, but his expression is the furthest thing from calm. “Any reason you’ve still got the mask on, kid?” he asks. “I mean, I already know who you are.”

Ruby winces, feeling strangely like she’s done something wrong. Well, she _has_ done something – many things, in fact – wrong, but wearing this mask really shouldn’t be one of them. “Ah – vision charm,” she explains, tapping it. “Whoever resurrected me apparently didn’t think to throw my glasses into the mix.”

“Hm,” says Hitch. There is an extremely charged silence. “What I’m hearing is, you didn’t resurrect yourself.”

“No,” says Ruby. “No, I _didn’t._ Sorry, did I not make that clear?” There’s a horrible anxiety that’s been welling up in her since she woke up for the second time, and it’s finally overflowing into something that feels a lot like uncontrollable fury. “Look, if I had my way, I’d still be dead.”

This statement is met with overwhelming silence. Hitch’s expression does not shift.

“I know you don’t want me here, I know that – that everything I did five years ago, was it five years ago? That’s the general gist I got, five years – I know that everything I did then kind of wrecked your life, and it wrecked _everyone’s_ lives, and – ”

“You think I _blame_ you?” he says.

“Uh.” Ruby pauses, thrown. “You... don’t...?”

“Jesus,” he says. “Christ, kid. You’re talking about wrecking _our_ lives, but we’re the ones who dragged you into this whole thing in the first place.”

“I – ”

“You are _fourteen._ ”

Ever since she came back to life – ever since the _Chateau,_ really – Ruby has been quietly, distantly wondering how Hitch would react if she were to lay out everything in front of him, like she’s just done. She’d predicted anger, disappointment, silent indifference, complete confusion; the entire range of negative human emotions, really. What she _hadn’t_ predicted was an apology. 

“I mean,” says Ruby. “ _Technically_ I’m older than that, because my birth certificate says I was born nineteen years ago and I think, legally, that’s the bit that counts. And I’ve always thought I’ve had the mind of a jaded, cynical twenty-one year old, so maybe it actually does make sense that I was treated like one – ”

“Even if that wasn’t complete bullshit,” says Hitch with what appears to be rapidly dwindling patience, “we don’t _tend_ to exile twenty-one-year-olds to a run-down old chateau on the side of a mountain to live out their days in the back pocket of misery.”

“You didn’t exile me, I platonically eloped with my best friend,” Ruby objects.

“That’s not – _Christ._ All right.” He rubs at his forehead. “Next you’ll be saying that you _deserved_ to die at the Chateau.”

“Well,” says Ruby, and then there is a very tense and charged silence between them, because there’s no actual good way to say ‘you’re right, I did’.

“Kid – ”

“I killed my best friend,” snaps Ruby. “Like, sure, I did bring him back, but – I also cursed him to an eternal half-life, and ended up losing control and hurting a _lot_ of people in the process! I got every single one of the animals I was taking care of killed; I created magical concepts that basically every horrible, evil magic user in the _country_ picked up and started using, and I was only fourteen years old at the time! Can you imagine how much worse I’d have gotten if I lived _past_ that?” She draws in a sharp, shuddering breath. “The only reason I don’t actually, properly wish I was _still_ dead is because, apparently, my mess still hasn’t been cleaned up by this point, and if I went and kicked the bucket again, I’d be leaving all of you to deal with it. Again.”

Hitch is silent, and his eyes shine, and he doesn’t say anything. And then he leans forward, and hugs her. Bonecrushingly tight. It’s both entirely unpredictable and something she thinks she really should have expected.

He doesn’t let go of her for a very, very long time.

“I don’t understand,” she mutters. She might be crying. Who’s to say, really?

“Okay,” says Hitch, “I’ll explain. I don’t blame you. I never blamed you. I’m hugging you now because I’ve felt guilty over your death and my role in it for the last five years, and basically everything you’ve just said is ridiculous. And I kind of want to lock you in a room with a therapist for a full month even though I realistically know – ”

“I’m beyond help, yeah, I know,” Ruby says into his shoulder.

“ – that every therapist in town would probably be scared to death of even talking to you, which is not a problem most teenage girls need to have.”

“Can you stop talking about my numerous problems and just hug me,” Ruby says. “I’ve just realized I’m, uh, _extremely_ touch-starved. Also ignore the crying.”

“I can do that, sure.”

“Thank you,” she says, and curls her fingers around his back and saves this moment in the back of her head forever.

“One question,” he says after what could be minutes or hours. “Why necromancy, kid? Why would you throw yourself into _that?_ ”

“It’s complicated,” she says, which isn’t necessarily a lie. Her fingers itch for her guitar, although she manages to quell the urge to run directly back to the room she had woken up in to pull it close to her and wrap herself in the dark and resentment. Like that’ll do anything to fill up the empty hole inside her. “I – let’s just say I didn’t have much choice, okay?”

“Are you going to elaborate on that?”

“No.”

He stares at her for a long, long moment, before just... nodding. It’s such a weird move coming from him, because the Hitch that Ruby remembers would have absolutely pressed the topic for all it’s worth until Ruby eventually cracked, or snapped, or ran away, or whatever. But he just turns away, reaches into a drawer and pulls out a small black case. Wordlessly, he hands it to her.

Ruby gives him a suspicious glance, but opens it anyway. It’s –

“Oh,” she says. “Oh – oh my god. You kept... my glasses?” She fumbles with the ribbon of her mask, drops it on the ground, nearly pokes herself in the eye trying to put her _actual proper real glasses_ back on, and... she can _see._ None of the weird sideways blur that her vision-correction spells always tend to have. “ _Yes!_ ”

“Figured you’d want it,” he says, and there is a _distinct_ hint of fondness there.

She looks at him, and sees that he looks exhausted. Not just a one-night sort of ‘I stayed up too late and I’m regretting it’ exhaustion; it’s years and years’ worth of the stuff. “There’s no way you knew I was coming back. Unless you’re the one who set the spell-?”

“No,” he says. “No, I didn’t know you were coming back. Hey. Have a shower,” he suggests, and points her down the hallway in the appropriate direction. “Get all that blood off – I know you just came back from the dead and everything, but you look like you’re _still_ dead, and trust me when I say that isn’t a great look.”

“I mean, if anyone can make it work, it’s me,” she says, but leaves to do just that without complaint.

The shower helps; it honestly, really does. She feels like she hasn’t had one in, like, a decade – which isn’t the case, it’s more like five or six years, give or take – and the warm water on her skin is nothing short of heavenly, even if the blood still pouring sluggishly from her shoulder is a bit of a mood-killer. Her hair ends up being a bit of a mess, but then again, it kind of always is.

When she’s done, she wraps her hair in a towel and pulls on her clothes again, and goes to find Hitch.

“I am cleansed of my sins,” she announces cheerfully.

“Uh-huh,” says Hitch. “If you’re feeling better, I was hoping we could talk.”

“About...?”

“All number and manner of things. But first.” He watches her as he sits down. “If it’s okay, I’m... a bit fuzzy on the details of – how you actually died? Could you fill me in?”

“Oh,” says Ruby, throat tightening up. “I thought you already knew about the siege on the Mountain Chateau, though? You kinda of implied it. Earlier.”

“I do. I was there.”

“I didn’t see you.” Ruby swallows with difficulty. She might have heard him yelling her name, but she never could remember for certain. It had been so messy, then, near the end... “So, it ended up being me and the Count, up on the roof, with a whole bunch of the kids.”

“Your-?”

“The animals.” The look he gives her when he realizes that she’d been calling the contents of her impromptu magical menagerie _her kids_ almost makes her smile. It’s kind of why she started doing it in the first place – Clancy had given her that same look. “Um, mostly birds at that point. The phoenix, a few of the impundulu – oh, right, the Qoqogaq somehow made it up there also? God knows how. They didn’t last too long, but they tried to help.”

“Help... with the Count?”

“Ah, well, you know how you don’t like me using resentful magic?” She lets out a laugh that doesn’t have much emotion. “They didn’t like it either. Leftover reflexes from, you know, being possessed and terrorized by it for so long – anyway, they did their best, did a lot of the work for me. And then the Count, he – they died, and I – I kind of reanimated their bodies. And then he got rid of _those..._ ”

She trails off.

“Ruby?” Hitch prompts after a moment of silence.

Ruby startles. “Yeah. Right. Long story short – the Count stabbed me, I stabbed him back, died from blood loss, got resurrected ten miles that-a-way, jumped out a window, hotwired a car with blood magic, bumped into Froghorn at the town border, tried to rob him but then my _friends_ showed up, and then a Beast of Bears _also_ showed up – tried to fight it, failed, you showed up, you know the rest, the end.”

“Um, can we go back to the bit where the Count stabbed you?” Hitch says, looking faintly overwhelmed.

“I’d rather not,” Ruby replies, “if it’s all the same to you. But, see when I woke up, there was...” She starts rolling up her sleeve to show him the curse-marks, but then pauses. “Wait, you already bandaged it up, you saw, right?”

“Yeah, I _was_ wondering about that.” Hitch leans forward. “Some kinda curse?”

“Pretty much.” She explains what she knows already – not much, all things considered – and then admits, “But I don’t really know what to do about it. I’ve never been a curse expert, no matter what anyone says – ”

“So you didn’t curse Froghorn?”

“Wha – you _know_ I didn’t,” Ruby replies, and even though Hitch nods as if he were expecting that, she’s still _extremely_ miffed. “Does everyone still think I did? Jeez, look – did the curse disappear when I died?”

“It didn’t,” Hitch says, leaning back. “Which means that you couldn’t have been the one that cast it, but Blacker managed to remove it not long after that, so...”

“So everyone just assumed I’d done it, and nobody bothered to correct them. _Ugh._ ”

“Well, we did. We _tried._ ”

“You and Blacker? Hey, yeah, Blacker’s a curse expert...” She trails away from her lingering frustration over _stupid people and their stupid opinions on necromancy and her and everything_ , and says, carefully, “Look, I know this might not be a good idea, but... I think I need to ask someone about this whole curse thing.”

“And you want to ask Blacker?” Hitch hums. “Not a bad idea.”

“What, really?” Ruby frowns. “He’s not going to, I don’t know, crucify me – ”

“Crucify you?”

“Well, yeah, I’m basically Necromancy Jesus at this point.”

“ _Crucify you._ ” Hitch’s eyebrows raise.

“...Fine, _report_ me, then. Or whatever.”

“No, it’s fine,” Hitch assures her, eyebrows still pretty high. “I told him – well, more specifically, the juniors told him, and he checked with me to make sure they hadn’t got into the hallucinogens by mistake again – ”

“ _Again?_ ”

“ – and, long story short, he knows.”

“He knows.” Ruby breathes out. “About...”

“The fact that you’re alive, not a terrible person, was only ever trying to _help_ but everything spiralled out of control – ”

“Wait, I didn’t tell you any of that stuff until, like, five minutes ago,” Ruby objects.

Hitch throws up his hands in exasperation. “Look, Blacker worked with you for _how long?_ I think he knows you well enough to know you’re not an evil world-conquering megalomaniac. He bought you donuts basically every day since you were thirteen, for God’s sake!”

“Okay, okay, fair enough, I _guess,_ ” Ruby says, although it doesn’t quite seem ‘fair enough’ in a way she can’t place her finger on. “So, let’s go find him. How are we doing this?”

Even though she has her glasses back, wearing them would make her identity far too obvious. So on goes the carnival mask with the vision charm, and this time it’s Hitch who adds the identity-concealment charm. Enchantment has never really been his thing, but he insists – not wanting her to use any more blood magic than is absolutely necessary.

She thinks for a moment that she’s going to have to go into Spectrum wearing the shredded remains of the clothes she died in, but Hitch goes and pulls out a long-buried box from a cupboard, and quite a lot of her old clothes are bundled up inside it, folded away neatly for – for _some_ reason.

“I will ignore the fact that you apparently kept my old clothes in your house for five years after I died,” Ruby says, holding up a grey t-shirt with the legend ‘SEIZE THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION’ emblazoned across it, “because this ancient dried blood is beginning to get _very_ itchy and I actually really missed this shirt.”

“So I got a bit sentimental.” Hitch leans against the wall, arms crossed. “Can you blame me? Kid, I don’t know if I made this obvious enough, but I _really_ missed you.”

Ruby doesn’t like the amount of sincerity in his voice. She swallows. “Good thing I didn’t age at all, huh? That would’ve made this so much harder. Right.” She scoops up the box, staggering a little under its weight. “Well, I’ll just go change into these now, and we can – break into my former workplace. Your current workplace. Whatever.”

She backs out of the room before the mood can get serious again, changes, and feels a whole lot better once she has actual shoes on and a shirt that pointedly yet passive-aggressively critiques the bourgeoise. Her fly barrette is also there, to her mixed shock and delight, so she clips that into her hair to keep it in check and hopes it won’t make her identity too obvious. She pulls her borrowed jacket over the top of it, because that’s less her style. Outfit complete.

She wants to bring her guitar, because – well, it’s her guitar – but Hitch refuses on account of it being a bit too big and conspicuous for her to sling over her shoulder and walk into Spectrum with. Which... fair, but also it means that Ruby’s main line of self-defence is gone. She isn’t too happy about _that,_ needless to say.

Nevertheless, they go outside, and Hitch pulls out his sword, and Ruby grimaces and says, “Aw man, do we _have_ to – can’t we just drive – ”

“Nope, sold my car for rent years ago,” Hitch says unapologetically.

“What? _Nooo,_ you _loved_ that car – why did you need rent, you get paid an _exorbitant_ amount – ” She spots his car, pulled up in the driveway, and her eyes narrow. “You liar _._ ”

“...So maybe I didn’t sell my car, but flying’s easier.” He tosses the sword out to hover in the air, and steps onto it. Ruby makes a series of disgruntled faces to hide the fact that she’s actually kind of legitimately terrified of this, but climbs on after him, wrapping her arms around him from behind.

She exhales, shuddering, and thinks, _It’s just Hitch, I’m not going to fall,_ and says, “All right, let’s get this over with.”

He glances back over her shoulder, and for a moment his expression of mild amusement falls. “You sure? Because – ”

“I literally died,” Ruby interrupts, fingers curling into his jacket. “Nothing can be worse than that at this point. Let’s go.”

“If you’re sure,” he says, and they lift off into the sky.


	6. today’s probably take your war criminal daughter to work day, right? right!

So, flying to Spectrum HQ isn’t nearly as bad as her mind had been building it up to be. She’s actually kind of missed skateswording. She can’t do it on her own, not anymore, not since losing her core in a tragic – well, not tragic – accident – well, it wasn’t really an accident either. She’d absolutely 100% meant to do it. That doesn’t matter. That’s not the point.

Her stomach swoops unpleasantly at the feeling of flight, but she tries to enjoy it as much as she can. Flying _is_ fun. The wind in her hair and the improbability of defying every logical law of gravity there is. She really would rather being the one in control of the sword, but hey – you have to take what you can get.

It’s a quick trip to the main Spectrum office, and the landscape of Twinford hasn’t really changed _too_ dramatically. An unfamiliar house there, a refurbished shopfront there. Are the trees lining the streets taller and older or is that just her imagination? She thinks of the tree on Amster Green, and tries to remember if she’d been the last one to leave a message there, and if Clancy had ever gotten around to reading it, or if it was the other way around. Maybe some other kids have claimed it as a meeting place, found the scraps of their origami messages.

God, _Clancy._

Hitch’s landing is both smooth and accurate, and they both hop off in front of the main office, Hitch neatly sheathing his sword over his back. It’s late in the morning, so – Ruby is guessing here, but she can’t imagine Spectrum workplace habits have changed _all_ that much in the last few years – there aren’t a lot of people here because it’s Lunch Break Time. Nobody casts her a second glance, which doesn’t stop her from feeling uneasy.

“The plan is...” Ruby starts.

“Go to Blacker’s office without making too much of a scene, and then work our way out from there,” he replies. “And if anyone asks, you’re one of my friend’s kids and I’m keeping an eye on you for the morning.”

Ruby almost laughs. “Is anyone going to believe that? You’re not, you know the babysitting time –”

“Yeah, last time I tried to look after a kid, she got herself stabbed through the stomach and died for a full five years,” Hitch mutters, and it’s quiet enough that she’s pretty sure she wasn’t meant to hear that. And then, more clearly, “What are they going to do, assume I’m lying to them?”

“Fair enough.” Ruby looks around, but nobody’s really paying them attention apart from respectful nods and waves directed at Hitch as people come in and out of the front office. “So what are we waiting for?”

“Well, I’m waiting for _you_ to be ready to go in; I don’t know what you’re waiting for – ”

Ruby frowns. “I’m ready. Of course I’m ready. Why – okay, never mind. Let’s just get this over with.”

They haven’t even bothered to repaint the ugly reception room in five entire years. It’s still that sickly shade of green. Some things never change.

Instinct and habit nearly drives her to wave to Buzz and chirp out a cheerful word of greeting as they pass by the front desk, but she manages to bite it back and follow Hitch without a word. Buzz, busy speaking what sounds an awful lot like Mandarin, doesn’t seem to notice her.

“Buzz is still here?” she mutters at his back.

He shrugs, and she notices his hand is resting casually on the sword at his waist. “I think she might be physically fused to the building at this point.”

“Hah. But seriously, have there been _any_ staffing changes since I, uh – ” They pass by a mage she doesn’t recognize, and she nearly bites her tongue. “ – went on impromptu vacation? I mean, you’re still senior, obviously... and Froghorn got... promoted?”

He hums, and his face shifts, evidently considering this. “Well, we’ve taken on a considerable few new recruits, but you met a lot of them yesterday, so I bet you already knew that.”

“...Yeah,” says Ruby, one hand against the wall to steady herself. It’s blue, shifting into purple. They’re heading for Array Research, she thinks, although it’s hard to be sure with the state her memory’s at. “That was _weird._ You don’t look all that different, but they’re all – tall.”

“Growing up does tend to do that to people, yes.”

Ruby doesn’t know how to voice the particular sort of bitter longing that comes with the thought, _yeah, but I should’ve been there too_ , so she doesn’t. Instead, she says, “Uh, anyone else?”

“Sam Colt transferred,” Hitch says. “Something about his husband and grief leave, I’m not sure of the details.”

“Aw, oh no.” Ruby liked Sam Colt. His training had been half the reason she’d survived as long as she had up at the Chateau. “Hope he’s doing okay, then. Uh, Kekoa?”

“Still kicking ass,” Hitch confirms with the hint of a smile.

“Hell yeah.”

“Language.”

“Fuck off, you said ass first,” Ruby retorts, and the exchange is so easy it’s like nothing has changed in the least. He’s reaching out to swat her gently on the arm or maybe ruffle her hair, and they’re both grinning lightly, when Hitch suddenly freezes, his gaze focusing on something over her head, and retracts his arm hurriedly.

Ruby tenses and looks over as casually as she can, and...

It’s LB. Ruby would recognize her anywhere – the gleaming white-sheathed sword at her hip, the bare feet. The thing that _isn’t_ familiar is the fact that she’s actually wearing something other than white. Her shirt is green and elegant and fairly plain but it still feels _strange_ to look at.

“Hitch,” she says, nodding, and then her gaze drifts over to Ruby, who promptly breaks out into a cold sweat. Oh no. “And...?”

“Bee,” Hitch says promptly. “Daughter of a friend, looking after her for the morning. She’s only ten, so be nice. Say hello, Bee.”

“Hi,” whispers Ruby, half-hiding behind Hitch – annoyed but still playing up the ‘shy little kid’ card. The identity concealment spell _should_ be enough to hold up the illusion, even if it’s a stretch.

“Hello,” says LB, with a tone that’s _maybe_ just a touch gentler than her usual terse gravel – and then any trace of it is promptly gone as she turns back to Hitch, all business once more. “I heard there was an incident out near the town border.”

“Some sort of wild animal, yes,” Hitch says. “The junior recruits took care of it – pretty good job, considering. They’re dispersing the energy now, as far as I know.”

“That’s good, that’s good to hear,” LB says, although she really does look horribly distracted. “Have you seen Bradley? We’re negotiating with Four, and I need his input on some of the more technical aspects – ”

“Last I saw him was Tuesday,” Hitch says, and LB gives a distracted nod and strides off past them without another word. As she does, something occurs to Ruby – although she does wait until LB is out of sight and out of earshot until she voices it aloud.

“Froghorn,” Ruby hisses at Hitch. “He didn’t-?”

Hitch looks down at her, and blinks. “He didn’t blab, no, I made sure of that.”

“But he knows it’s me?”

“Of course he knows it’s you, he heard me say your name and you had your whole – ” He mimes an angry guitar strum.

“Well, maybe next time _don’t say my name,_ ” Ruby snaps, and then her brain scrubs quickly though the events of the last few minutes, and she nearly walks into a wall. She inhales, eyes going wide. “ _Sorry, did she just say ‘Bradley’, as in MOTHERFUCKING BRADLEY ‘CHILD PRODIGY’ ‘HE’S SO MUCH BETTER THAN YOU IN EVERY WAY’ BAKER – ”_

“Ah,” says Hitch. “Yes. I knew I’d forgotten something. So, remember how Bradley Baker had been dead for a couple of decades when you got recruited?”

Ruby is losing her god damn mind. “REMEMBER? YES. YES, I REMEMBER. IT’S THE SORT OF THING THAT’S EXTREMELY HARD TO FORGET WHEN EVERYONE’S SHOVING IT IN YOUR FACE EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY, FOREVER.” She takes a deep breath, trying to force herself to lower the volume. “No – _no,_ wait a moment, shut up, she was using his name _present tense,_ which means he’s – he’s _alive?_ He got _resurrected?_ LB’s dead boyfriend got resurrected and he’s _working here,_ and she tried to MURDER ME FOR DOING NECROMANCY BUT THE MOMENT THAT SOMEONE USES IT TO BRING HER STUPID PERFECT SPY BOYFRIEND BACK FROM THE DEAD EVERYTHING’S _FINE_ AND _GOOD_ AND _PERFECT_ – ”

Hitch grabs her arm and drags her into the nearest empty conference room, not ungently. “I understand you’re going through a lot right now, but I need you to bring it down approximately fifty decibels before you bring the whole building running. And also, no.”

“No?! No _what,_ ” goes Ruby, who is indeed going through a lot right now.

“No, necromancy wasn’t involved. Because Baker was never actually dead.”

“ _He was never actually-?!_ ”

“Okay, sit down before you pass out. Let me explain. It’s a bit of a long story.”

*

The long story can be condensed into a very short story, as follows:

Bradley’s body, post array-explosion, was never recovered. Upon going through Ruby’s leftover notes, LB had discovered a tracking spell more powerful than anything she’d seen before (and this, Ruby does remember; that had been the result of losing a very specific trading card for two weeks and being annoyed enough to create a complicated magical array to find it instead of putting any actual effort in). LB had decided to at least put _one_ thing to rest – but instead of discovering Baker’s final resting place, she had found him alive. In Little Mountain Side, no less. Amnesiac, but perfectly fine.

“And she just... brought him back here?” Ruby asks, struggling fiercely to process this – they’re now heading towards Blacker’s office once again. “And he picked up his job like nothing had ever happened?”

“Well, there was a lot of work with psychologists and memory experts, but... yeah, pretty much.”

“I can’t believe I’m actually more upset about the fact that I missed this than the fact that I died,” Ruby says after a moment.

“Understandable.”

Ruby shakes her head. “I want to meet him – no, I kinda want to scream at him and ask what his entire deal is and why everybody loved him over _me_ so much – no, wait, meeting him would probably be a really terrible idea, wouldn’t it? He’s LB’s partner, and LB’s, uh...” She grimaces. “Yeah, probably better if we never meet, ever. He’d probably hate me.”

“I think he’d actually love you,” says Hitch, more of that weird fondness leaking into his voice. “You two are... _astoundingly_ similar, actually. But, yeah, best if we wait on that for just the moment.” He stands up. “If you’re done freaking out about old news...?”

“It’s not old news for _me._ ” Ruby gets up too, still mildly shellshocked. “But, yeah, let’s go find Blacker.”

It takes only a few minutes to reach the purple-tinted halls of Array Research, and when they come to a halt Ruby looks at the door, and back at Hitch. “So, just to check, he’s cool with...?”

“He was never _not_ cool with it,” Hitch tells her.

“I find that hard to believe.”

“I find it hard to believe that you seriously think that _Blacker_ could ever hate you, but, well.” Hitch shrugs, and points to the door. “Go see for yourself.”

Ruby gives Hitch an _extremely_ dubious look.

“If he starts firing off angry spells in your direction, I’ll jump in front of you to take the curses,” he says, holding his hand up. “Scout’s promise.”

“You were _never_ a Scout, don’t give me that,” says Ruby, but takes a breath, braces her hand against the wall, and then pushes open the door to the office anyway.

Blacker is sitting in one of the office chairs at a strange, unwieldy angle. One of his legs dangles over the armrest, and there’s a battered old paperback in his hands that he doesn’t seem to be actually reading, although he looks to have been staring at it quite intently until she pushed open the door.

He looks the same as he always has, if maybe a bit more rumpled than usual. She’s not sure if that’s because of the five-year timegap, or because of Recent Events.

“Oh, hey,” he says, looking up at her with a friendly little smile. “Did you need something? I was just waiting for...” And then he looks past her, and sees Hitch in the doorway, and he stops. Just. Stops. His gaze flickers back to her. And then back to Hitch.

“Surprise?” says Ruby.

“Is this,” Blacker starts, and trails off, voice croaking off into nothing.

“Oh – ” Ruby, remembering the obscurity spell is still active, takes off her mask, and reaches into her pocket for her actual glasses. She slides them onto her nose, and blinks at Blacker.

“Holy shit,” says Blacker. It’s the first time Ruby’s ever heard him swear to her face, which is definitely a Thing in and of itself. And he just looks so – absolutely _stricken._

“Yeah,” she says. “It’s – yeah.”

“Holy _shit,_ ” he repeats. “Ruby – Rube. You got stabbed. I _saw_ you get stabbed. And you’re...” He seems to struggle for words for a second, eyes raking up and down her. Looking for a nonexistent stab wound, or something. “...you’re _fine._ ”

“Jeez louise, I wish everyone would stop going on about the stabbing thing,” Ruby says, grimacing. “Like, all right, a dagger went right through my vital organs, causing me to bleed out within seconds and endure the most agony I’ve ever felt in all fourteen years of my life, but, like, I clearly got over it. ‘Twas only a flesh wound! It’s just – ”

She doesn’t get any further, because it’s at this point that he steps forward and sweeps her into a fierce hug, arms tightening around her back.

Ruby freezes, her eyes wide and her hands still up in a half-stalled careless gesture. Blacker’s threadbare old jacket smells faintly of garage oil and something vaguely fruity that has the faint sparky sting she associates with spell components.

“Don’t,” he says, “don’t you _ever_ do that again.”

“...Die?”

“ _Yes._ ”

“I will _try_ not to...?” Ruby tries, now actively attempting to squirm out of Blacker’s grip, which is getting distinctly tighter than is strictly comfortable. “But, y’know, death comes to all of us eventually, it’s funny how that works – ” She gives up and just kind of sags into him. “Good to see you too, man.”

He does not let her go when he says, “Wait, there’s a specific reason you came here, right? Because I can’t imagine you’d have wanted to come back here just to say hi – ”

“I would have!” Ruby says. “Just... okay, you’re right, probably not. I have many fond memories of this place but a lot of traumatic ones too. It’s about me being, y’know, resurrected.”

He finally lets go. “Okay, that was something I _was_ wondering about. Who actually did it? – bringing you back to life, I mean?”

Ruby and Hitch exchange a Loaded Glance.

“Well,” Hitch says, “that’s kinda the thing. We don’t actually _know._ ”

“Got cursed!” Ruby adds with a grin and a thumbs up, gesturing to her arm. “May or may not need to go on a bloody revenge quest in order to not die horribly! Again! And you have more experience in curses and cursebreaking than I do, so...”

“Sit down,” says Blacker, “and I’ll do my best. No promises, though. Whatever I was expecting out of today, it definitely wasn’t this.”


	7. impromptu magical musical blood surgery (and other terrible things to do on your ex-boss’s slowly dying body)

A few minutes later, she’s sitting down at a familiar wooden table in the array department with her sleeve rolled up and the bandages off. It’s the same wooden table that they used to do all their experiments and calculations on – the _exact_ same one, she recognizes her own handwriting several times over. The scorch marks and tiny carved sigils and single unflattering ink doodle of Froghorn are all still there.

She’s already drawn out what she can remember of the summoning circle from the abandoned house. Blacker has his reading glasses on and is squinting at the curse-mark on her shoulder, frowning to himself. He draws out a dip-pen from a mug full of writing implements, swirls it in a nearly dish of ink and starts scratching out a vague design onto the table in front of him. “You woke up and it was just there?”

“I’m thinking it was a result of the resurrection, right?” Ruby says, fingers tracing the carved lines of one of her early flashbang sigil attempts. Too much emphasis on heat, not enough light to be of use. She’d improved it later, though. “Revenge in return for life, or whatever.”

“Pretty much.” Blacker presses both hands to her arm, framing the still-dripping wound without actually touching them. “There’s no way of telling who you’ve gotta kill from the curse alone, which – not going to lie, it kind of sucks. It could be someone you walk by literally every day and still end up dying from it without ever knowing it was them.”

“Thanks, man. You always know just how to make me feel better,” Ruby sighs.

Blacker winces, apologetic. “Sorry, Rube.” He pauses, looking speculative, and his hand drifts over to the sketch she’d done of the summoning circle. “You know, it’s strange, because just looking at what you’ve drawn – I could almost swear this was one of _your_ designs.”

Ruby tugs her shirtsleeve down to mop up some of the sluggish blood trailing down her arm, and frowns. “What? I don’t see it.”

“I kinda do,” says Hitch from where he’s keeping watch near the door. “I’m not an expert, but – the curving, right?”

Ruby’s lips tighten, and she tugs the sketch away from Blacker. “If this is just because it’s a big scary necromancy thing and I’m a big scary necromancer – ”

“I’m not saying it actually _is_ something you made,” Blacker says, very calm but not at all condescending. He gently tugs her arm back, and starts rewrapping the bandages. “It’s just, you have a... very particular way of drawing up ritual circles. Remember when we were working on the tesseract case?”

“Kind of...?” Ruby rubs her lower arm, wincing, as he finished pulling the bandages tight. “Oh yeah, I did the circle to decode the structure of those bottlecaps. That was a whole thing.”

He gestures in the air, a circular motion spiralling outwards. “Working for the centre, building up the pattern from the inside out. Lots of layers, conditions that depend on each other.”

“Like making a clock tick. Right.” Ruby pulls on the sleeve of her jacket. “I remember explaining _that._ Still stands, by the way.”

“Not a bad way of looking at it,” Hitch admits.

“It’s an _excellent_ way of looking at it,” Blacker corrects. “And also, a way that not many people _do_ look at it. You’d have to have read Ruby’s notes to even think about constructing an array or circle in that way, and if you wanted to _actually_ construct them, you’d have to do a pretty in-depth dive into them.”

“So...” Ruby looks at Blacker. “You’re saying – ”

“You didn’t design this ritual, no. But whoever did was definitely inspired by your style. _Heavily_ inspired.”

“My style _is_ pretty great,” Ruby admits, and then her eyes widen. “The letter!”

“The letter?” Hitch says. “What letter? You didn’t mention any letter – ”

“Look, I was distracted – sue me.” She fumbles for her pocket, and tugs it out, handing it to Blacker, who takes it, adjusting his glasses with a puzzled little frown.

“Few things to note here,” he says when he’s done reading, and passes the letter off to Hitch, who takes it and silently begins scanning it. “Number one – _Spectrum’s got all the rest of your equipment locked up._ ”

Ruby blinks. “Yeah? What about it?”

“From what I’d heard,” Blacker tells her carefully, “they burned about 90% of it. Your notes, your inventions, your guitar – ”

“Well, clearly not the guitar,” Ruby points out.

“Mm, I _did_ hear about that. Which makes me start to doubt how honest LB and the rest of the higher-ups were about burning the _rest_ of your belongings.”

“Number two – ‘B.B.’?”

“Yeah, I’ve got no idea,” Ruby says, but the moment she voices the thought aloud, the pieces jam themselves together in her mind. She nearly falls off her chair from the force of the realization.

“Ruby-?”

“Solved it,” she says, a bit breathless, but the feeling that’s writhing its way up to choke her from the inside reminds her a lot of being strangled by resentment yesterday.

“Hm? That was fast. Faster than usual, even.” Blacker blinks over at her, a faint smile playing around his lips. “See, this is why everything went downhill after you left.

But Ruby isn’t listening, not really. “When I tell you this next bit, you’re going to _hate_ me,” she says quietly, almost to herself.

“Ruby,” says Blacker in that astoundingly gentle tone of voice of his. “You know we won’t – ”

“No, it’s – it’s not an exaggeration. It’s – _god._ ” She gets up and starts to pace, because sitting still has never been her style and every inch of her body feels like it’s tingling with nervous unhappy tension. There’s no real dramatic way to say this, and even if there was, she wouldn’t want to. “The note. It was signed ‘BB’. Nobody’s seen Bradley Baker for the last few days, and how many other BBs do you know?”

“Oh – oh _no,_ ” Blacker says, which might just be the understatement of the millennium.

Hitch’s eyes widen, realization dawning, and he swears. Loudly and explosively. He then whirls around to slam an angry fist into the wall.

Ruby can’t help but flinch at that, but she keeps on circling around the room, fingers tapping out a frantic rhythm against her thigh. “So assuming I’m right – and, okay, I’ll allow for a _little_ margin of error, because there’s always the possibility I’m wrong here – Bradley Baker, for whatever reason, trekked out to a safehouse in the middle of nowhere with my notes, and performed what has got to be the most _dangerous_ ritual I’ve ever heard of to bring me – _me_ – back to life.”

“It...” Blacker visibly swallows. His face has gone ashen, and he runs a hand through his hair. “...seems... like something he could do. He’s pretty brilliant when it comes to crafting arrays, so – ”

“Yeah, I’ve heard,” Ruby says, although for once it’s without bitterness, and then yet another piece slots into place. “There was a man there – I think he must have followed Bradley Baker, I thought he was there to kill _me_ , but maybe...”

“Maybe,” says Hitch, “maybe someone found out about what Baker was doing, and he was there to stop _him_ from bringing you back.”

“The only question is, why?” Ruby grinds her teeth together and stops to press her hands against the work table. Grounding herself. It doesn’t work very well. “Like – the dude basically pulled a resurrection of his own, minus all the fun necromancy resurrection side-effects that you _usually_ get from this sort of thing. He had his job back, his girlfriend back, the respect of literally everyone in this place – and he went and threw that all away to bring _me_ back to life? _Me?_ ”

“I mean,” says Blacker, rather quietly, “I would’ve done it. If I’d known how.”

Ruby freezes, and stares at Blacker. His face radiates sad sincerity.

She... doesn’t know what to say. And thankfully, she doesn’t actually have to say anything, because it’s at this point that they all become aware of a lot of noise happening right outside the door of the office. Around the whole building, really. Running footsteps, clattering all the way down the hallway. Quite a lot of people are yelling.

Ruby, Blacker, and Hitch exchange glances.

“Well, this can’t be good,” Ruby says, rather optimistically.

The door is thrown open. Ruby, belatedly, scrambles to pick up her mask – but four people who are both familiar and unfairly tall are already in the room with them.

“Hitch, Blacker, hi,” gasps Red, catching herself against the wall. Her short shock of hair is dishevelled and falling over her eyes. “And... Ruby, holy _shit,_ hi for real this time.”

“ _Oh no,_ ” goes Ruby, reflexively, and then slaps her fight-or-flight response with a mental rolled-up newspaper. “I mean – hi! Yes! That’s me! I’m alive! Someone told you I was alive! Which is – _neat._ Oop!”

Elliot collides with her, immediately sweeping her up (yes, up, _god_ he’s so tall now) into a short but _bone-crushingly_ tight hug. Ruby lets out an undignified squeak of surprise, even as Elliot sets her down and says, “We are going to _talk_ later, and I’m going to catch you up on literally everything you’ve missed – ”

“ – _obviously,_ ” Del agrees, “but also LB’s been poisoned and everyone’s panicking and I think she was asking for you two?”

“LB’s been _what?_ ” Blacker gasps, nearly falling out of his chair in his haste to get up.

“Poisoned – something in her lunch, we think?”

“Okay. Okay, _Jesus;_ okay.” Hitch looks wildly around, snatches up his sword and slings it over his back, and then rushes to the door – Blacker shoving all of his notes and papers to one side and scooping up his work bag and doing the same, sans sword, because he’s never really had much use for them. “Ruby, you – ” He visibly hesitates. “ – stay here?”

Ruby tugs her mask back on, makes sure her bandages are properly, tightly wound, and stands up. “Oh no, I’m coming. Poisoning drama in the literal same hour that I set foot into Spectrum? There’s no way I’m gonna miss something like _that._ ”

*

The mad dash towards the cafeteria doesn’t actually take all that long, and nobody gives Ruby a second glance. That could be because of the mask and the concealment charm, but there’s also a pretty distinct likelihood of it just being because everybody is just really, really occupied with the fact that their boss is currently dying.

Hitch and Blacker and Ruby end up in the middle of the crowd, with the other kids somewhere behind them, and everybody seems to be talking at once. Doctor Harper’s there, and she looks about the same as ever, except a bit more solemn and urgent, because she’s leaning over LB. LB’s been laid out on one of the cleared-off cafeteria tables, and she does _not_ look good. Her face is ashen and gaunt, and if Ruby squints she can see a faint pulsating darkness under her skin. And, like, there’s definitely no such thing as a _good_ poison, but this is definitely a pretty bad one.

She can tell just by looking at the scene that whatever Doctor Harper’s trying, it’s not going to work. It’s not because Doctor Harper isn’t good at what she does, because Ruby knows firsthand that she _absolutely is,_ but this is so completely out of her wheelhouse right now that literally all the standard medical knowledge in the world wouldn’t be of any use.

...There’s pretty much only one thing that actually _is_ going to be of any use.

“Whatever you’re thinking,” Blacker begins, who is very used to seeing That Expression on her face, but Ruby isn’t listening as she once again proves just how terrible her impulse control is and begins to whistle. Not _well,_ because whistling in-tune has never been her strong suit, but then again, it doesn’t need to be. She doesn’t need to play guitar well to raise the souls of the discontent dead, after all.

She directs her attention right at LB; worms in the music under her skin and starts searching around. It’s not hard to find it, because this specific poison is just about the most obvious use of resentment-as-assassination-attempt that she’s ever seen (and she’s seen a lot). It’s the sort of thing that would be completely unrevivable, under any normal circumstances.

These aren’t normal circumstances, though, because Ruby’s here, and Ruby is a necromancy _prodigy._

She purses her lips, harshens the whistling, and with a triumphant trill, the poison gets _scwoop_ -ed right out, like sucking up banana milk through a straw. Ruby releases it just before it can come ricocheting into her, letting it dissipate harmlessly up near the ceiling, and stops whistling.

As she does, she lets out a sigh of relief – and then realizes that everyone’s staring at her, and thinks, _welp._

“Necromancy,” someone hisses.

“Oh boy,” says Ruby, smacking her parched lips. “Well, before you start stringing me up in a noose outside, I should probably let you know that your boss is no longer poisoned and dying slowly, so jot _that_ down – ”

“Hitch,” says LB, and her voice is hoarser than usual, but still quite clear. She hasn’t opened her eyes, but she seems to be feeling better already. “Please explain to me why your friend’s ten-year-old daughter has just performed necromancy on my still-living body.”

“I... can’t,” Hitch admits. “That’s pretty incriminating, isn’t it?”

“Pretty incriminating,” agrees LB, and breathes in sharply.

Blacker, right next to her, touches Ruby’s arm and murmurs, “Might be time to make a speedy departure, yeah?”

Ruby agrees with this assessment but, looking around, can’t actually see any good routes of escape. The door they’d come in through has a veritable crowd of other Spectrum agents blocking it, and all other exits are covered by even more people. Maybe if she got one of the junior team to fly them over the crowd on sword – but, no, the roof’s too low and besides, they’re too far away.

“Ten?” asks someone from the crowd. “Are you sure? She looks more like – ”

“What’s with the mask – ”

“ – _whistling?_ That’s crazy, nobody can – ”

LB’s eyes snap open, blue and sharp. Not a trace of pain or poison left (of course; Ruby _knows what she’s doing_ ), and staring right at her.

“I’d appreciate it if you would take off your mask,” she says.

“I’d appreciate it if we could take a rain-check on me taking off my mask,” Ruby says. “Uh, I’ve had some _really_ terrible acne problems, and it’s not _bad-_ bad, it’s just kinda embarrassing, and I’m – ”

“ _Take off your mask._ ”

Blacker’s hand tightens on Ruby’s arm, and Hitch makes as if to step in front of her, but Ruby shakes them both off – even though she appreciates the effort.

“Okay,” she says, “but you have to promise not to get mad.”

“Mask,” says LB, hand tightening on the hilt of her sword, “off. Now.”

Ruby sighs, and pulls it away. No use prolonging the inevitable, after all.

There’s a moment of complete silence as everybody processes this.

“Surprise, bitches. Bet you’d seen the last of me,” she says.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Hitch go through every single stage of grief in rapid, rapid succession before settling on exasperated acceptance. And then she finds herself, quite suddenly, at the sharp and pointy end of what is... _quite_ a lot of swords and assorted weaponry.

Hurriedly, she raises her hands in surrender. “Hey, okay, no need to be like that; I don’t even have my guitar with me – ”

There are maybe fifty-to-sixty people in the cafeteria. With the exception of Hitch, Blacker, and the junior squad, literally _everybody_ is wearing expressions of assorted fear, confusion, and open hostility. Ruby has the distinct feeling that if it weren’t for Hitch being right next to her, she’d be dead already. Again.

“Redfort,” says LB evenly, and she slowly sits upright. It’s impressive how steadily she manages to do it, considering that she’d literally been dying maybe ten seconds ago. “Not only are you alive, but you’re here, in the middle of Spectrum Eight. And you’re practicing necromancy. In front of me. _On_ me.”

“Okay, uh,” Ruby says, “so, first of all, I didn’t, like, fake my death or anything. I _was_ actually dead. Second of all – I don’t want to be here? Not really? It was a weird long string of coincidences – and you’re reaching for your sword, all right, moving onto the last point; the only reason I did necromancy on you, in front of you, was to _save your life because I don’t actually want you to die please don’t murder me, please –_ ”

She shuts her eyes quickly as LB surges to her feet, and automatically flinches back. After a moment, she opens her eyes to find that LB has not, in fact, done a murder.

“Explain,” she says instead.

“It’s a long story, but all right. I was born in nineteen-sixty, and it was – ”

“Explain the poison part.” LB’s expression does not change.

Ruby fumbles for a decent explanation. “It’s like... one of those slappy-hand toys?”

This actually gets LB to blink in genuine, honest-to-god confusion. “What?”

“You know, one of those colorful slimy hand things that they give you at birthday parties? Like, it _says_ on the packet that it can pick up everything, but it’s so hard to control and also the stickiness is kind of terrible, so most of the time you end up just waving it around and annoying everyone – ”

“I know what you’re talking about, Redfort,” she interrupts. “I do hope you’re getting to some sort of point with this.”

Ruby swallows. “Um. The point is, they’re pretty much useless at everything except getting tangled up with each other. If you get one slappy-hand mixed up with another, then they’re pretty much stuck like that until you can properly untangle them, if you even care about that... my metaphor has run away with me. What I’m saying is, I kind of flung the metaphorical sticky slappy-hand of my necromancy magic at you until it got tangled up in something similar to it. And then I tugged it out.”

“That’s the how. So, _why._ ”

“Why... did I save you?” At LB’s nod, Ruby stares at her incredulously. “Because... I... didn’t want you to die?” A beat. “It’s not a trick, if that’s what you’re thinking – you can get Doctor Harper to check, seriously. I didn’t mess up your – ” Her voice catches. “ – your magic core – why would I do that?”

Doctor Harper (one of the few people _not_ holding a weapon on Ruby, thank you, Doc) quickly reaches for LB’s hand, and although the expression on her face is stormy and her fixed gaze on Ruby doesn’t linger, she allows it. A couple of seconds pass, as Doctor Harper runs a few brief magical checks and tests, and then she drops it, stepping back. “It seems... fine. Everything in order. You’re a bit drained, and I’d advise you to check back with me in the next few days, but...”

“See?” Ruby spreads her hands, widens her eyes. “All peachy. You should be sending me flowers, honestly.”

“Why are you _back,_ Redfort?” LB says, her mask finally cracking. She looks somewhere between desperation and hopelessness. “Why _now,_ of all times?”

It’s. _Not._ The right time to tell her that her partner sacrificed his life to bring Ruby back. It’s super not. It’s never going to be the right time for that, but now is an especially terrible time. But it’s kind of all she can think about right now. “I have no idea, would you believe that? And with such a,” she swallows, “ _delightfully_ welcoming reception, jeez, I can’t imagine why I stayed away for so long!”

“How – ”

“Would you believe me if I told you I didn’t know?” Ruby fires back.

“I would not,” LB says. “I refuse to believe you do not have ulterior motives in being here, and whatever they are – ”

Ruby has actually had enough. She is _done._ She is completely done with this stupid organization and its equally stupid leader, and all of this. And so Ruby, who is _clearly_ impulse control incarnate and how dare anybody suggest anything different, finds herself opening her mouth and saying, without really thinking about it, “Who do you _think_ gave you your precious shiny magical core back, man?”

Silence. Just, complete dead silence.

“It was,” says LB, and her hands goes to her chest. She swallows visibly. “We never found the source. Some kind stranger, they found a method – we couldn’t trace it – they reconstructed – ”

“You can’t reconstruct a magical core, try again,” Ruby says. “Come on, Doc – ” She turns to Doctor Harper, appealing. “You’re the expert, you should know that.”

“I.” Doctor Harper’s jaw works silently for a moment. “...I will admit, I did find the concept strange. It didn’t make much sense, but...”

“But you accepted it, because the alternative is that LB’s core just sprang back into existence out of nowhere, and that’s even _weirder,_ right. Occam’s Razor, or as I like to call it, Rule 28. But you were right. It _is_ impossible to regrow a magical core. The only way to get one back is...” Ruby’s own chest twinges, and she has to stop herself from touching it, because that would make her mirror LB right now, and that’s a bit of synchronistic symbolism she does _not_ want to participate in. “...a little thing I like to call ‘experimental surgical transplant’.” 

People start to talk. Low murmurs, sweeping across the room like a wave.

“You didn’t,” Hitch says, sounding choked.

Ruby huffs, and crosses her arms. Everybody’s about to get emotional over this, she can already tell, and she would rather not deal with it at all – but she’s already put it out there. “Let me put it like this. No teenage girl takes up a form of magic which, by definition, is _stupidly_ corrosive to your mind, body and soul unless they absolutely have to.”

“You...” LB is beginning to look faintly ill. Almost like she’s been poisoned again, even though Ruby knows that’s definitely not the case.

“Why would I give up _flying around on a sword_ for necromancy?” she says. “Murder guitar is cool, I guess, but it just doesn’t – ”

“ _Stop making jokes about this!_ ” LB roars at the top of her lungs.

“No!” Ruby yells right back. “I won’t! Because jokes are all I have! Because this sucks, and _you_ suck, and I gave you my stupid source of magic because I actually _respected_ you, and since you’re being like this now, you might as well have to live with the knowledge that _you_ are literally the one responsible for me going all ‘out of control’! You’re welcome! Congratulations!”

Blacker is saying something to Hitch, who is nodding – even though the two of them look shocked and horrified from the absolute bombshell she’s just dropped on the entirety of Spectrum, it looks like they’re planning something.

She thinks, _well, they probably should hurry up with whatever it is,_ just as LB takes a shaking step forward, and draws her shining, iridescent sword with a clean, sharp swipe of metal-on-metal.

“Redfort,” she says –

Ruby sees Mouse, on the other side of the room, reach into her jacket pocket, and catch Hitch’s eye very pointedly. A nod is exchanged between the two of them, and then Ruby is lucky enough to be looking in precisely the right direction to witness some extremely masterful sleight-of-hand as Mouse activates and detonates a massive flash-bang sigil without _anyone_ noticing it’s her. The room goes up in light and smoke, and Hitch grabs Ruby by the arm.

“Out?” she guesses.

“Out,” he confirms. “Quick as we can, let’s go.”

And it’s through the crowd, ducking and weaving and shoving people aside as quickly as they can until they reach an exit. They pass by Mouse on the way through, Ruby can feel her by the weight and warmth of the sigil still caught between her fingers, and Ruby taps her on the shoulder and whispers, “ _Thanks,_ ” and gets a happy little hum in response.

There is an awful lot of screaming and yelling going on behind them as they end up escaping down one of the less jam-packed corridors. Blacker catches up to them at the edge, shaking ink and sparks of residual energy off his fingers. “Don’t run off so fast, I’m coming too – ”

Hitch is shaking his head. “You don’t need to, you could easily talk your way out of it – say you didn’t realize it was Ruby – ”

“Nope, not doing that again,” Blacker says instantly. “Felt guilty enough about _that_ for the last half-decade, so – guess I’m getting charged for treason now!”

“Hey, welcome to the team!” Ruby says, clumsily clapping him on the arm as they all begin to spring again. “It’s good fun, as soon as you get over the whole ‘people always trying to kill you’ thing – ”

They burst out into the lobby, right past Buzz (who blinks at them in the closest thing to surprised that she ever gets), and out through the doors.

“Right,” says Hitch, “now we need to – ”

At this point, LB proceeds to drop directly out of the sky like a goddamn roc going after some new, tasty form of prey. Right in front of them. Sword drawn. Oh boy.

“ – run very fast in the opposite direction. _Move!_ ”

LB’s skin is still kind of off-color and there’s a bit of a maniac gleam in her eyes and she seriously needs to lie down and have, like, some _serious_ naptime for Getting-Rid-Of-Poison Reasons, but she’s not doing that. She’s advancing, slow and steady. “I don’t intend on hurting you, but I can’t allow you to leave.”

“You want to know what happened the last time someone told me that?” Ruby yells over her shoulder – Hitch and Blacker are dragging her in the opposite direction. “I _died._ Don’t want a repeat of that, so no thanks, goodbye!”

“What?” says Blacker. “Did that – did that _really_ happen?”

“Probably not, but it sounds dramatic,” Ruby admits. “Do you think if we flew, she’d – ”

Another person drops out of the sky to land with a mighty, ground-shaking impact. Ruby rolls her eyes, because it had been cool and terrifying the first time, but honestly? Nobody likes a copycat. Who even is this guy – wait, _Froghorn?_

“ _Miles?_ ” Blacker says, who seems to be having the same reaction to this situation that Ruby is.

“If you make a big deal out of this,” says Froghorn, who has physically placed himself between LB and their impromptu seditionist magical trio, “I _will_ scream. And possibly turn around and stab you instead.”

“Uh, holy shit,” says Ruby.

“Mind your fucking language,” replies Froghorn. He glances over his shoulder and catches Hitch’s eye. “ _Go._ I’ll hold her off,” he says, and then brings up his sword to meet a powerful downwards swipe from LB. Sparks fly. It is possibly the coolest that Froghorn has ever looked, and Ruby actually does want to stay and witness what’s probably going to be a _really neat fight scene,_ but Hitch grabs his sword and throws it down to float in the air, which means that they’re going. Now. WHich is probably the most sensible course of events.

“... _Can_ we fit three people on one sword?” Blacker asks, looping his arms around Hitch’s waist.

“Ruby’s light enough that she barely counts as a person, it should be fine.”

“I object to the phrasing of that, but mechanically, you’re probably right,” Ruby mutters. Blacker’s not a tall man, so she can just throw her arms around his shoulders and hold on like that.

Somehow, the trip back to Hitch’s apartment is even quicker this time. It’s probably a combination of adrenaline and the fact that Hitch is going far, _far_ over the recommended speed limit. They get off at the sidewalk, and Hitch is immediately scanning the skies. There aren’t any mages visibly following them, but they all know it’s only a matter of minutes. “We need to block them off – ”

“We’ve got it,” Blacker says instantly, and then glances over at Ruby with a hint of nervous trepidation on his face. “...I – think...?”

“We do,” replies Ruby, who has missed working with Blacker like a physical _ache_ because pretty much nobody apart from Clancy has ever _got_ her in the way that Blacker did. “We’re going to need, um, blood and ink – and, oh yeah, probably my guitar – ”

Hitch doesn’t look very happy about that, but he nods, already going into the house. “I’ll get it.”

“I’ve got ink.” Blacker is unpacking his bag, scattering paper and pens and notebooks all over the pavement. “Blood, um, isn’t...”

“Isn’t your thing? Sorry, man, I think it’s kinda necessary here. Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty inside me.”

“Yeah, and it’s supposed to _stay_ inside you,” Blacker grouses quietly, but doesn’t complain any more about it, even as Ruby starts inking out the seven-fold array in wide crimson streaks drawn from her arm. “Oh, right, speaking of which... you have been losing a _lot_ of blood.”

“Shouldn’t I be dead by now?” Ruby completes, frowning as she dashes in signs and symbols at the speed of light. “I mean, this sort of curse isn’t meant to kill me _quickly,_ so it kind of makes sense that it’s not... bleeding me to death.”

She scoots back, and starts trailing symbols in a long string, moving back towards the house. Blacker takes her place, marking around the edges of the summoning circle with thick, neat streaks of ink. “You haven’t been feeling dizzy?”

“I’ve been feeling dizzy from the moment I woke up in that house,” Ruby mutters, gritting her teeth. She only realizes it’s probably not the most normal thing to admit when she looks over and sees that Blacker has stopped writing. “What are you doing? We’ve got to finish this – ”

“Sorry, right – ” And he’s back to writing. “It’s just... you know that’s not good, right?”

“Eh, resentful energy’s a bitch,” she dismisses, which feels like a pretty accurate guess for why her head’s been pounding all this time, although... it doesn’t feel _quite right,_ actually. But there’s no time to think about that. Not now. She trails the symbols up along the side of the house, looping them around the edge of the doorway, and starting to bring them along the outside of the building.

Blacker laughs, suddenly. “You know, I actually can’t remember if you always swore this much.”

This makes Ruby laugh too. “I can’t either, believe it or not. Let’s just assume that I always did, that seems in-character for me.”

She goes left, skirting the outside of the house and sketching symbols and sigils to drive in spikes of power at regular intervals. Blacker goes left, and when they meet up at the back of the house, they cross over and double-check each others’ work with the serious, singleminded focus of two array experts who have had all too many complicated arrays blow up in their faces due to a single misplaced stroke.

When they arrive back in the front of the house, Hitch is back with Ruby’s guitar. She takes it, fingers already dancing over the strings, and both Hitch and Blacker stand back to wait in the doorway.

This part is actually the easiest, because all she has to do is gather up all the resentment close by, and just kind of... inject it directly into the system that she and Blacker have set up. Within seconds, she’s got a pretty good amount of it, and she’s pushing it through the array, making it light up in glowing blue and angry red, and a shimmering veil seems to fall over the house for a moment.

She lowers her guitar. “That should do it. I can hold it for, like, a few days, maybe?”

“Lemme check,” says Blacker, and steps out of the confines of the array, turning to look back at them. Even though he’s still looking directly at Hitch and Ruby, he almost immediately loses focus, and turns his head from side to side in confusion. Ruby reaches out, tugs at his sleeve, and pulls him back inside.

“Strong enough?” Ruby asks, even though she knows it is.

“We’ve still got it,” he confirms, with a little flash of a grin, and raises a hand. She doesn’t even pause to think before slapping it in an enthusiastic high-five.

There’s a moment of silence, and then everything that’s happened today kind of catches up with Ruby at once, and she staggers back to catch herself against the doorframe. “Huh.”

Hitch moves forward, as if to catch her, but stops at the last second.“You good, kid?”

“Just kind of off. Low blood sugar, maybe,” she says, which isn’t exactly the full truth, but also she could do with something sweet and pointless.

Blacker, who’d definitely saved and committed the whole ‘I’m always dizzy’ thing to his permanent ‘I Will Remember This So Help Me God’ memory, gives her a _look_ but doesn’t say anything until Hitch nods and leaves for the kitchen, declaring his intention to cook them up something like dinner. Even though none of them probably feel all that much like eating, considering.

Blacker and Ruby move to the living room, and Ruby leans her guitar on the ground before pouring herself out onto the couch, limbs going everywhere. Blacker sits in the armchair across from her, similarly entangled in a way she’s sure her parents would approve of either of them doing, because apparently sitting down the _boring_ way is the only polite way to do it –

“So,” Blacker says after a moment, calculatedly casual. “Your core, huh?”

Ruby sighs. “Guess it’s too much to hope for that we’re just going to skirt around this for the rest of my life and never talk about it again, huh?”

Blacker runs a hand through his already-fairly-dishevelled hair. “Yeah, sorry. I just... it’s gonna haunt me otherwise, y’know?” A pause. “Does it hurt?”

She opens her mouth to lie, and then looks at Blacker; properly looks at him. Words can’t describe how much she’s missed him.

She says, “Not anymore.”

There’s a brief pause where she can tell he’s reading between the lines, and then he says, with a heavy sort of horror, “...You used the phrase ‘experimental surgical transplant’.”

“Clancy and I broke into Doctor Harper’s lab for the materials,” Ruby says, closing her eyes. “His hyperfixation was magical surgery at the time, and I was thirteen and stupid and a prodigy. We weren’t _experts._ Of course it was gonna suck. I just...” Her hand traces her stomach for a moment. “Whatever. It’s over now. I just wish she’d appreciated it a bit more, y’know?”

She can tell Blacker has no idea what to say, and she can’t blame him. After another second, he says, “If you’d told her at the time – ”

“I mean, I did it because I respected her, and she didn’t have her core, and she was, like. A living zombie at that point.” She frowns. “Bad choice of words. You know what I mean, you were there. Her pride’s always been a big thing for her, and if she’d know that a teenage girl swapped her core out for hers – ”

“She’d’ve lost it.”

“Yep.” Ruby reaches out to drum her fingers over the wood of her guitar. “I was gonna tell someone eventually, but... everything happened so fast, and there was never a good time. And then, the Chateau. And then I died. Y’know. Normal, fun times in a teenager’s life.”

The silence is no longer comfortable – it’s actually fairly overwhelming.

“When did you grow up so fast?” Blacker whispers.

“Somewhere between almost getting killed by a psychopathic theatre kid and realizing I had to tear out a vital organ to prevent my mentor’s complete psychological collapse,” says Ruby, “at a guess.” She sighs, and then (partly to prevent this conversation from going anywhere along this path, and partly because it’s been really genuinely bugging her and she _needs_ to know) says: “Hey, so... about my parents – ”

“Oh,” says Blacker in that particular little quiet way of his, and then clears his throat. “Yeah. So. They still think you’re dead, hey?”

“Yep.” Silence for a second. “Did you guys ever actually tell them about-?”

Blacker winces, visibly. “...Nnnnno. It – it seemed kinder to let them think you died in, you know – the initial town siege.”

“Oh boy,” says Ruby, and stares at the wall. “Well, this is going to be a fun conversation to have with them when – when I – hang on, where are they? Hitch took my stuff, so... is my house still-?”

“They moved upstate. To somewhere that was, um, less of a magical hotspot – Monterey Bay, I think?”

“Okay,” says Ruby, more mildly than she’d expected to say it, “okay. Well... I do want to see them. But maybe we could sort out this whole thing with me dying first?”

“I mean, you’re not going to die,” Blacker says, and reaches out to nudge her arm with a fist. “I, for one, am _not_ letting that happen, and I’m pretty sure Hitch feels the same way.”

“Yeah, but does everyone else?” She can’t help the self-deprecating little smile that slips loose, but she’s legitimately surprised when Blacker sets his mouth in a firm line and then sits back, raising several fingers.

“Well, there’s the juniors, for one thing, I _know_ they’re on your side – did you see Mouse pull out that flashbang, earlier? Good kids, all of them, and I’m pretty sure they’ve missed you just as much as we have. And then there’s Miles – ”

“Man, I still don’t get why he went all action hero like that,” Ruby interrupts, shaking her head. “I mean, I was pretty sure the guy _despised_ me, and I literally tried to rob him and then paralysed him bodily, like, yesterday – ”

“But,” says Blacker, “he didn’t know it was you.”

“I’m pretty sure if he knew it was me, he’d’ve reacted _worse._ ”

“Don’t be so sure.”

“But – ”

“I’m with him on this one, kid,” interrupts Hitch, appearing practically out of nowhere. “You haven’t been here for the last few years. You haven’t seen him. He was genuinely torn up about the whole think. Kept on muttering about how he could’ve done better – I’m not surprised he jumped at the chance to make things right.”

Ruby sinks down onto the couch, drawing up her knees. “You keep saying that about _everyone._ ”

“Surprisingly, there’s a pretty small subset of people that actually, properly, genuinely wanted a fourteen-year-old dead.”

“I can’t believe,” says Ruby, “that I find that hard to believe.”

Blacker pats her shoulder and Hitch ruffles her hair and she tolerates it for a moment before shaking them off with a faint smile. She appreciates it, she’s just... finding it very hard to accept it right now. “Okay,” she says, moving quickly on, “so, about the array – ”

But Hitch cuts her off – neatly, no-nonsense. “Nope. You can solve the conspiracies of the magical world tomorrow.”

“But – ”

“No,” says Hitch firmly. “Kid, you may be the most feared necromancer the world’s ever seen, but right now we are eating dinner, and then you are going to _bed._ ”


	8. six dumbass teenagers in a haunted house: the world’s leading cause of terrible necromancy-based catastrophes

Clancy says, “Look, are you sure about – ”

“Sure I’m sure,” Ruby snaps, and she really doesn’t mean to actually _snap_ at Clancy, especially not when he’s holding a surgical scalpel and a pair of pliers right over her exposed belly, but this is a _stressful situation okay_. “Look, I don’t know how long the anaesthesia’s gonna last on her, so if we’re gonna do this...”

“Gotta be fast. I get it. Right.” He lowers the scalpel, and then raises it, and then says, quick and stressed, “You _do_ know that I’m not a surgeon and I’ve only read three entire books about how to do this, and – ”

“ – and sixty-percent of this is theoretical?” Ruby grimaces, grits her teeth. “Yep. You’ve only mentioned it about half a million times, man.”

“I just don’t want to be responsible for murdering my best friend, Rube!”

“I’m not the one who you need to be worried about, worry about murdering _her_.” Ruby jerks her head across to the other person in the abandoned medical lab they’re in. “I’m not the one who’s gonna haunt you for the rest of your life if you mess this up.”

“I’m going to throw up,” Clancy decides, and he does look really quite sick. He looks so different like this. Alive. This was when he was alive, before everything had happened, and – why is Ruby remembering things that haven’t happened yet?

She stares at him, sees his pale face and the blood on his shirt, and now she’s staring down at his body. His extremely motionless and unmoving body. There’s tears on her face and a half-broken guitar in her hands, and her best friend looks so _dead._ It’s just his soul, it’s only his soul that’s been torn out of his body, but isn’t that just death when she thinks about it.

This won’t stand. She can’t let this stand. He’s _got_ to come back. He’s got to.

“Get up,” says Ruby, and then she inhales on a sob because it isn’t _working,_ and growls, voice thick with darkness and dripping with blood, “ _get UP!_ ”

She slams her hands into the ground, and it echoes for miles, and Clancy’s eyes shoot open. They’re pure black.

Ruby screams and keeps on screaming as the Count drives his dagger into her stomach. She claws at him, trying to push him away, but it’s too late, and it’s all she can do to start whistling with a mouthful of blood bubbling up with every note, summoning something to get him _back_ with.

“For the record,” he says, rather conversationally, as she reaches through his body and punches a hole clean out of him, “I really am sorry, my dear. We could have done so much good together.”

“Oh, screw that,” she says, spitting blood out of her mouth. “A you-me teamup would’ve sucked and you know it. You’re a drama major and I’m a STEM kid.”

“Always with the witty retorts,” he says, ending in a gasp as he runs out of air. “Off you go, then,” he chokes, and heaves her off the edge of the roof, toppling backwards as he does. She goes wheeling back into the dark cold night, and –

– and then it stops.

She looks up to see a man she only barely recognizes holding her hand, preventing her from falling. Actually, she’s pretty sure she’s never actually seen him in her life, so why is his face ringing a faint bell?

“I’m gonna have to drop you,” he says conversationally. 

“Uh, yeah,” she replies. “That’s how this sort of thing usually goes?”

He winces out a half-grin. “Well, ouch, kid.”

“It’s cool, no hard feelings.” Ruby hangs there, dangling. He has made no move to drop her. The adrenaline and terror that had been fogging her mind dims and evaporates. “Um, so are you gonna-?”

He purses his lips and her, and then shrugs. “I’ve got a better idea. I think you’d prefer to stop being asleep right now, so...”

Which is true, but since when was she asleep? Is this-?

“Three, two, one – ”

*

Ruby wakes up with a sharp intake of breath and a million dark thoughts swirling through her head. She curses, and clenches her fists, willing the angry energy to recede back to rest under her skin. Nope. Not thinking about that. Not thinking about _any_ of that, not tonight.

It takes her a full minute to realize that it wasn’t just the bad dreams – bad _memories,_ really – that were responsible for waking her up. She’s still tense, wound tighter than a coiled spring, but now that she’s just a little bit calmer, she can tell that something in her immediate surroundings has shifted. It’s like a tug, pulling her to get out of bed and pull aside the blinds.

The clock next to her bed beeps gently, indicating that it’s midnight, and she stares.

Clancy Crew is standing right outside the bedroom window.

His eyes are bone-white and unseeing, and he still doesn’t seem to be entirely _there,_ but he’s standing there on the thin strip of pavement and he seems to be waiting for something.

Glancing to her left, she can see that the barrier sigils are still glowing, steady and reassuring, which – all right, that proves _something,_ probably, even though she isn’t entirely sure what it is. That Clancy is still somewhat connected to her? Or that whatever’s happened to him, it’s given him the ability to bypass arrays. She whispers his name, but there’s no response, and even when she calls a little louder, he doesn’t really react.

Ruby grabs for her guitar, and slings it upside-down over her shoulder before sliding out through the open window and coming to land, a bit awkwardly, on the pavement in front of them.

“Clance?” she says, one hand on the guitar’s neck. He doesn’t say anything, but he also doesn’t make any real movements, threatening or otherwise, so she guesses that she’s probably good to keep inspecting him.

He hasn’t aged, not like her other friends have. Not really, at least. He might be a bit taller, but it’s hard to tell. She’s guessing that’s probably a side-effect of the whole ‘living dead’ thing, but there’s not much precedent so she couldn’t say for certain. He’s wearing some weird black uniform, too – similar to the Spectrum uniform, in some ways, but it’s a lot sleeker and streamlined.

He’s got his swords, though – two of them, crossed neatly over each other and laced over his back. They’re _his_ swords – the ones that Ruby had made for him, which means that they’re really not the most well-crafted or expertly-designed, but he’d still declared him the best one-month-anniversary-of-being-dead presents ever, and –

Ruby can _feel_ some sort of resentment, and can tell it’s not hers. She walks around him, trying to trace it. Reaching his back, following the traces of ‘dark, mad, and unhappy’ that she can feel like a tug – and she just about falls over as she reels back in horror at what’s there.

There are. _Needles._ In the back of his neck.

What the fuck.

_Someone put needles in the back of her best friend’s neck._ Drilling into what she’s pretty sure is his brainstem or something? They’re practically spilling angry energy at the seams, and there’s, like, a pretty non-zero chance that whatever this is, it’s why he’s so unresponsive, and why he looks like he’s 100% dead. As opposed to the rough 50% that he really should be.

It’s probably a really dreadful idea, medically-speaking, but Ruby’s never been one for impulse control. She reaches up, and grabs all three of them and yanks them out, and – Clancy kind of crumples, like she’s just cut all the strings keeping him upright.

She yelps and drops the needles and bends down to catch him, but misses. He goes crashing to the ground. It looks painful. Whoops.

But within seconds, his eyelids are fluttering, and when he opens them a moment later, they’re _brown._ She can actually see his eyes! Properly! And he clears his throat, looking dazed and kind of confused, and says, “Rube-? What – ”

She dives at him, and he lets out a squeak of surprise as she basically clings to him like an octopus without any intention of letting go. He lets out a startled laugh, and hugs her back, and for a moment or two they’re just kneeling on the pavement near Hitch’s house, locked in a tight embrace.

“Aren’t you supposed to be dead?” he says eventually.

“Uh huh.” Ruby does not elaborate.

“Shouldn’t... _I_ be dead?”

“Last I checked, you still were, buster.”

“Yeah, but, like – proper _real_ dead.”

Ruby sits back. “Y’know, I thought you were. I really did. But then you turned up just outside of town, looking pretty freaking zombie-like, and I was like, _whoa, guess they didn’t actually kill him!,_ and then I was like, _but if he sticks around for any longer they might actually do it properly this time –_ ”

“You’re not making much sense, you know that,” Clancy says, but he sounds fond.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Hang on, let me back up to the beginning. Sort of beginning. Whatever.”

They sit cross-legged on the concrete strip, facing each other, and Ruby fills him in. It takes a while, because – well, there’s a lot of stuff to cover here. But Clancy’s always been a good listener. He doesn’t even freak out _that_ hard when she mentions the revenge curse.

“Bradley Baker... wants you to kill someone?” he says when she’s done.

“Wanted. He’s a bit too spiritually obliterated to want anything now, ever again – but, yeah.”

“Who could a guy like _that_ want you to kill?”

“Beats me. I need to figure it out pretty quickly, though, because I think I have, like – a week, tops, before this curse slurps me up like a banana milkshake.”

“Ew.”

“Slorp.”

“ _Terrible_ mental image. You’re the worst.”

“I know, I know.” Ruby sighs, and rubs her arm. “I wish I’d met him, y’know? Like, I get that if I _had,_ I probably wouldn’t even have this problem, but... I don’t know, I got compared to him basically every five seconds back when I was actually working with Spectrum. I guess everyone sort of built him up into this legendary figure.”

“But now it turns out that he’s just some guy,” Clancy says. “Some guy who was _very alive_ the whole time.”

“Yeah, and he was also apparently suicidal enough to crush his own soul into shreds just to bring me back to life.” She pulls her guitar into her lap, and presses her fingers into a silent chord pattern. “Nobody’s perfect, I guess. Hey, can you remember anything from – after they caught you, I guess it would be?”

“After you died, you mean?” says Clancy with a little unhappy grimace. “Um. Not a lot. I think they must have used some kind of array to restrain me.”

“Must’ve, yeah.” Clancy doesn’t _look_ like what you would call ‘ripped’, not really, but he’s ridiculously strong. Side-effect of being brought back to life and maintained with some of the most cutting-edge theories and techniques Ruby had been able to slam together. “Probably a really powerful one, considering. Seriously, though, _anything?_ Anything at all?”

“I remember... someone smiling at me,” Clancy says slowly. “It’s kind of the last thing I _do_ remember, actually – before everything went all fuzzy and dark-magic-y. She did _not_ have a nice smile. She...” He reaches back, touches the nape of his neck, where the needles had gone in. “I’m, like, eighty percent sure she was the one that did this, actually.”

“Jabbed a bunch of mind-control needles into you?” Ruby clarifies, and at his nod, says, “Well, that _can’t_ be good. Who would do that? And why?”

“ _Why_ seems kinda obvious, Rube.”

And, okay, yeah, it kind of is. Quite aside from being the result of a completely unprecedented magical experiment-slash-panic-attack, Clancy’s probably the most powerful undead being in the country. Not that you’d know it by looking at or interacting with him, but – if you’re the sort of person who wants hardcore fighting done for you, it’s a very unfortunate truth that Clancy Crew is kind of the best person for the job.

“Sure. Okay. But you can’t remember _what_ you were doing for the last, uh, five years?”

“Not a thing.” Clancy looks immensely frustrated. “And, like – I know her face! But I don’t actually know who she _is._ ”

“Can you, uh...” Ruby leans back in through the window to grab her jacket. She doesn’t have drawing paper or any of her notebooks, but she _does_ have scrap sigil-paper, and a pen she’d grabbed from Blacker’s office. “Here, can you draw her?”

“You know I’ve never been great at drawing, Rube.” Clancy grimaces, but takes the offered writing implements anyway. He leans over, pressing the paper on the ground, and starts to draw.

He wasn’t lying. It’s honestly a really shitty drawing. But Ruby looks at the vague shape of the face, the hastily scribbled haircut, and the dull unimpressed eyes, and says, “What?”

“What?” Clancy echoes, sitting back.

“Are you – look, are you sure about this?”

“Pretty sure.” Clancy looks down, and pulls a face at the drawing, apparently equally unenthused at the quality of it. “She was wearing a Spectrum uniform, if that helps – ”

“Clancy, you’ve just drawn _Buzz,_ ” says Ruby, grabbing the scrap of paper and holding it up at him pointedly. “Buzz. Fucking – _Buzz,_ the front receptionist. Are you seriously telling me...” And here she trails off, because... _huh._ “...No. No, I refuse to believe that – do you _think_ she could actually be the one behind all this?”

“Um,” says Clancy. “Look, I don’t know all that much about her apart from... the few things you mentioned to me? But, I mean. If I was trying to infiltrate the country’s most powerful magical society in order to carry out my horrifying evil schemes... I’m pretty sure taking up the position of ‘front receptionist’ would be a pretty clever way to do it.”

“Shit,” says Ruby, and sits still for a long moment. Her hand finds its way up to her arm again, and her fingers wrap around the still-bandaged curse wound. “That... makes an unfortunate, terrifying amount of sense.”

“Do you think that, uh, _she’s_ the one you need to...?”

Ruby squeezes her own arm so hard that it hurts, a fierce sharp lightning strike of pain, and then she shakes her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know – okay, hang on, gotta make a plan real fast. Please hold.”

“Holding,” Clancy says obligingly.

Ruby takes a moment to weigh all of her options, and then nods. “Well, I’m going to get dressed, and then we’re going to go hold a seance in an abandoned house far, far out of town,” she says, standing. “Coming?”

Clancy scrambles to his feet. “Seance? Abandoned house? – wait, I thought you said that Bradley Baker was completely spiritually obliterated?”

Ruby grins, pleased to hear that he’s still as quick on the uptake as ever, and then it fades. “Well, yeah, he is. But there’s probably other ghosts still floating around that house, right? And with the amount of resentful energy that it would’ve taken to bring me back...”

“They probably noticed,” Clancy completes, nodding. “Right! Right – but, what about Hitch?”

Ruby freezes, midway through climbing back in through the window. She clears her throat, and says, “Well... I’ve been missing for five years already! I’m sure he’s used to not seeing me at this point, it’ll be _fine._ ”

“You’ve been _dead_ for five years,” she hears Clancy mutter, but she refuses to listen. She throws on a t-shirt that reads ‘Arcana-Resistant? More Like NARC-ana-Resistant’, a pair of jeans, and some shoes, and then, after a moment of hesitation, discards the fly barrette.

“Right,” she says, after climbing out, now fully equipped for the occasion. “Let’s get going.”

They begin walking, skirting through the back alleys of Twinford as quickly and quietly as they can. Hitch’s apartment is in West Twinford, right at the outskirts, so it doesn’t take them too long to reach the industrial district.

“I can probably break through the town outer shield in, uh, less than ten minutes? I’m ninety-percent sure they stole the designs from me in the first place,” Ruby says. “Like, I wasn’t sure _before_ but then Blacker pointed out this whole thing, and apparently they’ve been copying from my notes for years. Pretty sure that’s not legal, y’know?”

“Next time,” says Clancy, “you might want to think about getting a patent taken out on your weird death magic blueprints.”

“Sure, right; I’ll remember that the next time I end up in this very specific set of circumstances that I’ve found myself in over the course of the last decade-or-so.”

But when they reach the town border, they realize that it isn’t necessary – because, for some reason, when Clancy approaches the barrier, it just... falls away in front of him.

“Huh,” he says.

“Huh,” Ruby agrees, and watches him step through. It seals up behind him, and when she waves a hand near it, nothing happens. “Do you think this is because... hm, maybe my necromancy style and the shield style are compatible or something?”

Clancy steps back through to join her. “I’m not an expert, but that doesn’t sound right.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Ruby says. “Uh, but I think I can trick it into letting me through. Just gotta...” She pats at her arm, drawing blood from the ever-present wound, and doodles a swirling design, right over her heart. “If I can piggyback off you – ”

“Still messing up your shirts with blood magic, huh?” Clancy says, sounding kind of exasperated and kind of horrified. “Isn’t there a better way to do that?’

“Look, man, I don’t wanna get it on my skin. Doing that _stings._ ” She finishes with a flourish, and taps it twice to set it off. “I might also need a literal piggyback, by the way.”

“Oh! Uh, sure.” Clancy turns around, shifts his swords to one side so they won’t gore her through the stomach, and she climbs up and curls her legs around his waist, hugging him from behind. It’s always kind of astounding that he can lift her like this, now, without any effort whatsoever. He looks so scrawny. “Do I-?”

Ruby rests her chin on his shoulder. His skin is so cold. “Yeah, just go through.”

“All right, if you’re sure it isn’t going to zap you.” He takes a completely unnecessary breath, and then starts off forward. The two of them pass cleanly through, and he visibly cheers up. “Hey, nice one.”

“Thanks,” Ruby says. “Tweaked some stuff so that the two of us technically count as one person. Uh, corpse. Whatever. It accepts you as free to go in and out whenever you want, so it also accepts me by proxy.”

Clancy nods thoughtfully. He makes no move to put her down. “Okay, and while we’re at it – which way are we going, by the way?” Ruby points, indicating, and he begins to run without visibly expending any effort. He’s not breathing heavily, because he doesn’t need to breathe. Perks of being dead, apparently. “While we’re at it, I think the reason it might have let me through is because... whoever I was working for probably keyed me in?”

Ruby hangs on tight, and thinks about this for a moment. The night is crisp and bright, and the breeze is cool against her face. She can feel the distant tug of ghosts and corpses and resentment-powered animals of all sorts, but none of them are especially close anyway.

“Huh, yeah,” she says. “Working under the assumption it’s actually Buzz – she’s probably got the authority to make changes to the system like that, doesn’t she?”

“Probably.” He glances up at her, still maintaining a steady speedy pace. Twinford is a distant, twinkling toy model of a town in the distance behind them. “Mind using that big, fancy math brain of yours to work out how long I need to run for?”

Ruby licks a finger, sticks it up into the air. “Um. Your fastest speed is, like, forty, right? So probably – fifteen minutes, give or take.”

“Could be worse.”

“Sure could.” She winds her arms tighter around his shoulders. “Thanks for doing this, by the way.”

“Carrying you out into the desert so you can hold a seance in an abandoned house in the early hours of the morning?”

“Well, yeah, but mostly just... still being around. Not hating me for turning you into some weird zombie thing. Not getting weirdly _tall_ while I was dead.” She pulls a face that he can’t see. “Elliot got so _tall._ It’s horrifying.”

“Oh, I can’t wait to see that,” Clancy says. “Wish I was tall.”

“ _Mood._ ”

As a matter of fact, it takes less than fifteen minutes to reach the abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. Clancy lets her down when they reach the side of the house, right up next to the fencea, and Ruby hops down, trying to get the feeling back in her legs.

“Hey,” she says, pointing, “look, you can actually see where I smashed through that window.”

“I wish you’d stop jumping out windows,” Clancy mutters. “That can’t be good for your life expectancy.”

“Eh, I didn’t expect to live past fourteen anyway, so any life expectancy past that is good as far as I’m concerned.” She swings her guitar around, checks the tuning, and then nods. “I think we’re good to go. C’mon, we’ll circle around. The summoning circle was on the second floor, so...”

They circle around to the front of the house, Clancy leading the way (he’s far better equipped for a physical fight than she is), and... the front door is swinging wide open, creaking faintly on its hinges.

They both look at it in silence for a moment.

“So,” Clancy says, “either you left it open when you ran for it, it’s ghosts, or there’s someone inside right now.”

“I can hear footsteps on the first floor,” Ruby says. “Leaning towards that last one.”

Clancy shrugs long-sufferingly. “Can’t be any worse than taming that rougarou,” he says.

“Yeah, but you’ve just woken up from a half-decade-long coma, and I’m slowly dying of a revenge curse,” Ruby points out. “I’m all for being confident in our skills, but I kinda want to survive this night now that I know that not _all_ my prospects at friendship are completely crushed.”

She realizes too late that the two of them are speaking at a volume that is _entirely_ too loud for the circumstances, and she realizes that at the exact same moment that she hears multiple sets of footsteps clattering down the steps and towards them.

There is the _swish_ of multiple swords being drawn, and as the door slams open all the way, the black veins on Clancy’s skin have risen and intensified as he prepares to Kick Some Serious Ass with both swords out, and Ruby has her guitar out with her fingers on the B-string (the most threatening of guitar strings, clearly). She can make out four sword-wielding silhouettes, so they’re outnumbered two-to-one. Okay. They’ve definitely had better odds, but they can do this.

And then one of their armed attackers trips and falls flat on their face, and lets a distinctly Red-like yelp.

“Wait,” says Ruby, forcibly pushing back the forces of darkness and despair that she’d been summoning to her fingertips at that very moment. “Wait, what are you guys doing here?”

There’s a confused pause.

“What are _you_ doing here?” Del snaps back, as Mouse grins and waves.

“ _Ruby!_ ” Elliot exclaims, actually dropping his sword to the ground in delight. “Oh man, I thought we’d never see you again, LB was _so_ mad – ”

“It’s Ruby?” says Red, pushing herself to her feet. “Oh hey, it is – hi, Ruby! Nice to see you properly this time, ha!”

“Jeezy creezy,” grumbles Clancy, visibly untensing and lowering both of his swords, “what are you all _doing_ , bumping around a creepy old house in the dark like that; we could’ve killed you!”

Another pause, this time less confused and more disbelieving.

“Dude, what the fuck, didn’t they incinerate your body or whatever?” Del says, eyes widening.

“ _Del,_ ” Mouse says reprovingly.

Ruby has more important things on her mind. “Seriously, why are you here? Are you the only ones, or are there any more Spectrum people around? Because I do _not_ want to get into a sword fight with anybody tonight, especially since I _physically cannot use any swords anymore_.”

“...Nobody else,” says Elliot. “Just us.”

“ _Elliot?_ ” Clancy says suddenly, and squints upwards. “...You _did_ get tall. That’s. Whoa.”

“You got _small_ , man,” Elliot says. “Or, I guess you were _always_ small and I just... never noticed...? You also got dead,” he adds, looking abruptly crestfallen. “Aw man, that sucks.”

“It’s not so bad,” Clancy says. “I can lift an entire mountain lion over my head now.”

“Okay, this is fun, but,” Ruby swings her guitar back over her shoulder. “We are _very_ exposed out here, and then last time I was exposed like this in the middle of the night, I got stabbed and also died. Let’s go inside, and maybe then the Spectrum Junior Squad, TM, can tell us what they’re doing out here in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night with literally no backup at all, because personally? I can’t _wait_ to hear this.”

*

The Spectrum Junior Squad, as it turns out, is there for basically the same reason Ruby and Clancy are.

“We thought there was, uh, something pretty weird about the whole ‘you spontaneously coming back to life because Bradley Baker sacrificed his life’ thing,” Del says, and both Ruby and Clancy nod.

“So Elliot pointed out that we knew the _rough_ direction you’d come from,” Elliot says. “And Mouse’s pretty good with charms and sigils, so she could get us the rest of the way... we were thinking of having a seance, to see if any of the spirits or ghosts around here could tell us exactly what went down.”

“Hey, _same,_ ” exclaims Ruby. “Like, exactly the same, actually. That’s _weird._ ”

Del shrugs. She keeps eyeing the two of them warily, like she’s not really sure how to react to their presence. “We were just about to get started, but then Mouse got distracted by the array upstairs, and she wanted to see if she could absorb any of the intent with, I don’t know – salt, was it? And then you two showed up.”

“Are we invited to the seance party?” Clancy wonders.

“I mean, sure, if you want,” Elliot says eagerly. He slides off the living room table he’s been sitting on, and points at Ruby. “I mean, considering that you’re basically the mother of all modern evil necromancy-ghostly-creepy magic, you’re kind of the best person to have on our team when doing something like _this,_ right?”

“Ugh, don’t call me the mother of _anything,_ ” Ruby complains. “I’m younger than you are, remember?” She swings her guitar around so it’s resting on her lap. “Screw it, I’m just going to get started. Here’s as good a place as any.”

“We were going to do it upstairs, at the summoning circle,” Del says.

Ruby has already thought about that, and has realized that she really, _really_ doesn’t want to go back up there. “Shouldn’t matter. Not that much. Let’s see – ” She begins to play, pulling at the threads of dead consciousness scattered around the house. “It’s been a while since I tried to communicate with dead people, rather than exploit them for my dark, nefarious plans – that was a joke, Del, seriously, stop looking at me like that.”

“Hey, I was meaning to ask – do you actually, _uh_ ,” Red winces as Ruby strikes another horrible non-chord. “ – is the way you play, um, on purpose?”

Ruby stops, and scowls at her hands. “Do you think I’d be making this racket if I knew how to make it sound _good?_ ”

“No clue, man; sometimes you just do things for the hell of them. That’s what I remember you being like, anyway. Um.” Red fumbles for a moment, and then pulls out one of those interdimensional pouches. From it, she draws out a guitar – a lot more beat-up than Ruby’s, which is impressive, but also the strings look cleaner and it’s a tiny bit smaller. Abruptly, Ruby remembers that Red is an _actual_ guitarist, and had been taking lessons for years when they’d first met. “Look, maybe I can-?”

“ _Please,_ ” says Ruby, quickly lowering her own. “You do the main summoning stuff, I’ll – I can translate?”

“Oh, that’d be _amazing,_ ” Red says fervently. “I’ve never been good at the translation bit, and if you can actually talk directly to the ghosts like all those rumours said-?”

Ruby does double fingerguns, because for once her reputation isn’t terrible. “Sure can. Upside of giving your body and soul over to the eternal darkness.”

Red nods at this thoughtfully, although Ruby sincerely hopes she isn’t _actually_ considering a magical career change, and starts to play. Her fingers are a bit clumsy over the strings, but it actually sounds _right_ as she starts to pull a melody out of the instrument. It’s classical-sounding, somewhere between a waltz and a jazz standard, and Ruby can almost hear the question in it. She turns her attention outwards, and starts paying attention to the spirits in the immediate vicinity, trying to hear their responses.

There’s a _lot_ of responses.

“Yeah, there’s ghosts here,” Ruby says. “A... weirdly large amount, huh.” She looks over at Red. “Can you ask them what killed them?”

“First thing we learn in weird ghost seance school, believe it or not,” Red says dryly, but dutifully plucks out the appropriate chords. Ruby listens, her head tilted to one side, as the ghosts respond – a lot quicker and ready-to-please than they’ve ever done for _her_ music; stupid classical purist ghosts and their mainstream musical appreciation tendencies.

“Apparently,” she says, very slowly, “a plane crashed here. A few decades ago, actually.”

“It doesn’t look a lot like it, though,” Del says, looking around as if she’ll be able to spot the smoking wreck of the plane just by squinting harder.

“The house got built on top of it, in the last few years,” Clancy supplies, because he’s also been listening in. He’s not as fluent as Ruby is, but he’s still, like, mostly dead. And that counts for something in these sorts of situations.

“That’s a weird sort of place to build a house, man,” Elliot comments. “Kinda hardcore, but still weird. Like, of course you’re going to have tons of ghosts there – why even bother?”

“Well.” Ruby frowns, then bites her lip, and sits back against the wall. “I can think of _one_ reason. Red, ask if they know who built the house.”

“Um.” Red squints, and then plays the question, a spiralling downwards riff of notes.

“Yep,” says Ruby, upon hearing the response, and closes her eyes with a sigh. “Of course it was Bradley Baker.”

“The plot _thins_ ,” Elliot says enthusiastically, leaning forward.

“Isn’t it ‘thickens’?” Clancy says with a little frown.

“Is it? I always thought the other way around made more sense. I mean, the plot’s definitely getting easier to understand and move through – if it was thickening, I think we’d be drowning in it by now.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it’s thickening,” is Red’s opinion. “Mainly because I don’t understand any of it. Why does it make sense that this is Bradley Baker’s house?”

Ruby folds her arms, and tries not to sigh again, because she’s been doing a _lot_ of that, recently. “Well, he allegedly died in a plane crash – the first time, I mean – and it’s probably not a coincidence that he built a house over the wreck of one. You can connect the dots, probably. Also, I’m starting to get the impression he’s wanted to bring me back for a while, and the best way to run a summoning like the one he used to yoink _me_ from the afterlife... you gotta build up a whole lotta resentment to manage something as big as that.”

“So,” says Clancy. “He builds a safehouse on top of a mass graveyard, keeps it seething with energy for a few years, and then, when he thinks he’s good and ready...”

“Boom, blood sacrifice,” Ruby agrees, nodding, and then drops her head into her folded arms. “God, I hate my life.”

“But _why?_ ” Mouse says. She’s been extremely quiet all this time, which Ruby had chalked up to her doing her hard Thinking things (which she apparently hasn’t grown out of, nice). She looks up, hair falling over her eyes and a deep slash of a frown creasing her mouth. “He never seemed suicidal.”

“Wish I knew,” Ruby replies. She looks at Red. “Anyone on the other side got any ideas?”

She means it mainly as a joke, but Red dutifully plucks out the question anyway. And surprisingly, the ghost of a young woman, sitting just next to Ruby (if she’s hearing right) actually does have an answer for her.

“Huh,” says Ruby.

“What?” Elliot asks. “What is it?”

“Apparently he brought me back,” she says, and lifts her sleeve to peer at the revenge curse underneath, “because I’m the only person who can deal with... whoever _this_ is.” She looks over at Red again. “This is a long shot, but... maybe they know?”

“Very long shot,” Red agrees, but plucks out the question anyway.

As it turns out, it _was_ a bit too long of a shot – none of the ghosts have any memories of Baker mentioning it. And what’s more, the longer they hang around, the more restless they’re starting to get – they’re starting to get bolder, tugging at Ruby’s energy and consciousness, and playing around in the empty hollow where her core had used to be.

“We should wrap this one up,” Ruby suggests, wincing. Red looks over at her, pulls a face in horrified agreement at whatever she sees – it must not be great, whatever it is – and starts playing the closing melody that’ll push all of the restless spirits back into wherever they’d been lurking before the six of them had arrived.

When that’s done, they all sit there and catch their breath, except Clancy, who doesn’t physically need to breathe.

“See,” says Ruby after a moment, “the _thing is_ , I have this revenge curse mark thing because of the whole resurrection thing, right?”

There’s scattered noises of _mhm,_ and _sure_ and _Ruby, what the fuck._

“Which means that whoever I need to kill is probably behind, uh, LB getting poisoned and Clancy gettin’ nailed in the neck, and... come to think of it, probably the Beast Of Bears from a few days ago? Because, you know, they’ve all got the same flavor, and. I can’t think of many other people that Bradley Baker would want _dead._ Aaaaand...” Ruby scratches her head. “Clancy and I are moderately sure that the person behind the nail thing, at least, is Buzz.”

“Buzz,” says Del disbelievingly. “Buzz, the receptionist, _that_ Buzz.”

“See, when _she_ says it, it sounds stupid,” Clancy mutters.

“I mean, if you’ve got to kill someone... she might not be the _worst_ person to go after?” Red says, slowly but optimistically. “Like, it’s definitely not the best outcome, but – look, have you ever actually seen her pick up a sword? It’s not like she’s going to be _hard_ to kill.”

Ruby’s about to answer, but then something tugs at her consciousness. It’s far away, but it’s _strong_ , and it’s also really, really angry. Ruby can feel the hairs on the back of her neck begin to stand on end.

“Do you guys... hear that?” Red asks, head slowly tilting to one side.

Ruby can’t hear whatever Red does, but she sure can feel it. And one looks at Clancy confirms that he can probably hear _and_ feel it.

And then there’s a distant noise, rolling like thunder and shaking the foundations of the old, abandoned house, and okay, yeah – Ruby can definitely hear _that._

“That probably isn’t good,” Elliot says, scrambling to his feet, and he dashes for the door.

At the same time, Ruby rushs to the window, and catches herself on the frame so hard she just about gives herself whiplash. Her heart is pounding like crazy, and her head is beginning to ache in that way it only really starts to when there’s some _serious_ resentment in the air nearby, and it takes only a split-second of looking at the gradually brightening horizon to see _why._

The sun’s coming up, and with it, a veritable army of animals are approaching. Not just any animals – magical ones, of all shapes and breeds and walks of life. And not just any magical animals. Dead ones. Ones that she recognizes. Recognizes _immediately._

Fury builds up in her; angry water pressure in a rusty pipe. She can feel the darkness curling up around her, her hair beginning to drift around her face.

“I,” she says, “am going to _kill_ her.”

Clancy comes up to join her and puts a hand on her shoulder, but she can tell the exact moment when he stops trying to comfort her and sees what she sees, because his entire body stiffens and stills. “I’ll help,” he says from between gritted teeth.

“What’s going on?” Del asks, coming to peer over their heads, and she stills as she takes it in. “That’s... a lot of animals.”

“Yeah,” says Ruby, still seething, “ _our_ animals.” She takes a deep breath in. “Apparently nobody bothered to lay their spirits to rest properly after I died, which means that _anybody_ could just waltz in there and resurrect them – and apparently that’s exactly what Buzz did.”


	9. getting real into that whole unethical necromancy schtick

They’re all crowded at the window now, surveying their new, unfortunate situation. Elliot comes stumbling in, out of breath from having made a quick loop of the house. “They’re on all sides,” he reports. “More on the east side.”

“Great!” says Ruby, spinning away from the windowsill and tugging angrily at her hair. “I _love_ being under siege. It’s my favorite hobby. My day is officially made!”

“They’re not moving _fast,_ ” Red says, frowning.

Ruby knows exactly how this sort of thing works. “Yeah, because they’re not planning on attacking us yet. It’s a scare tactic.”

“Scare tactic – so they don’t want to kill us, they want to...?” Elliot trails off, wiggling his fingers in outright bafflement.

Ruby is abruptly reminded that, even though these four people are physically and mentally older than her and Clancy, _they’re_ the ones that lived through and participated in an actual war. Several wars. Clancy is the one to answer, which is probably a good thing because Ruby’s suddenly finding it kind of hard to breathe. This is the worst possible moment for it to all be hitting her at once like this, and _yet_.

“I think,” he says, “that if Buzz could make it so that certain people can go through the barrier, she also knows _who_ goes in and out of the barrier, since... that’s probably her job. She probably noticed me crossing out through the barrier, and guessed that Ruby and I had figured out _something,_ and she probably also didn’t like that a whole lot. And probably wants to get rid of us.”

“Oh,” says Elliot. “So, they _do_ want to kill us.”

“Yeah,” says Ruby, regaining her breath. “But first, she wants to scare us into doing something hasty and stupid. Which isn’t what’s going to happen.”

“Great,” says Del. “Just so you know, the four of us _are_ pretty good at the whole ‘fighting off monsters’ and ‘getting rid of minor curses’ thing, but we’re also juniors and _super_ not equipped for, uh, whatever _this_ is supposed to be, so...”

“Clancy and I can take them,” Ruby says, fingers tightening around the neck of her guitar. “For a little while, at least.” Her brain’s now in full strategy mode, and she can almost feel the internal gears whirring as she begins to piece together a hurried means of attack. “But the easiest way to get rid of an army of resurrected spirits is to take out whoever’s controlling them.” She whirls, and takes in the four juniors, all with their swords. “Okay, you guys can all fly, so... Mouse – do you have a flare sigil?”

Mouse holds up a handful of them. “Plenty.”

“We’ll hold them off for as long as we can. You guys go overhead, try to find Buzz. Or whoever’s in charge. I’m assuming it’s Buzz, anyway.”

“Buzz, the _receptionist?_ ” Elliot says incredulously. “I know you said it already, but are you _sure_ -?”

“No, but it’s the best guess we’ve got,” Clancy says.

“When you find her, send up the flare and we’ll cut over to you, and we can, you know, come over and help take her out.” Ruby hesitates. “She’s gonna be dangerous. _Super_ dangerous. Anyone who can raise an army this size would be – and she probably has at least _some_ of my notes.”

Red grimaces. “So are you telling us we _should_ fight her, or...?”

“I’m saying that fighting her would probably be a terrible idea, but you’re probably going to have to do it either way, so have fun and good luck!”

Nobody looks like they’re preparing to have any sort of fun at all (and to be fair, Ruby isn’t exactly thrilled about it, either) but nonetheless, the four older kids – it’s still so weird to think of them as _older than her_ – mount up onto their swords, and Ruby pushes the double-window open to allow them passage outside.

“We didn’t have as many flying creatures,” she adds; parting advice. “Like, a _few,_ but not so many that you should be overwhelmed. Rocs have bad sideways vision, phoenixes aren’t as quick at flying as you’d probably think, and if the Impundulu starts sparking and humming, get away as fast as you possibly can.”

“The _what,_ ” says Elliot, looking alarmed.

“Lightning bird. You’ll know it when you see it.”

“Oh boy, oh jeez, _that_ doesn’t sound deadly and terrifying and horrible at all – hey, maybe we could come up with some other sort of – ”

Mouse, who is hovering right behind him, promptly and unceremoniously shoves him out of the window. He shrieks but stays perfectly balanced, and the others seem to take this as their cue to follow him out – shooting out into the sky. Almost immediately, a warped screech echoes out over the desert, and a hauntingly familiar phoenix whose wings are twisted and dripping black residue dives right at them.

“I hate this,” Ruby says, forehead pressed against the wall. “I hate this a lot.”

“How do you think _I_ feel, I woke up less than three hours ago,” Clancy replies, unsheathing his swords with one practiced movement. “And I have to deal with all of _this._ ” He squints down at the approaching army of zombie animals. “Welp. Here they come.”

“And here we go,” Ruby agrees, and strikes a swirl of angry, twisting notes, pulling every ghost in the immediate vicinity to her side. At the same time, the veins on Clancy’s skin begin to rise and blacken. They exchange a glance and a nod, and then step out onto the windowsill together. “Let’s hope this goes better than the last time.”

They jump. Ruby curls the resentment around herself to cushion her fall and make the leap longer, Clancy just lands on the ground and starts slashing away like a dual-wielding maniac.

She’d never actually _enjoyed_ the act of fighting all that much – despite her constant attempts to worm her way into the training program and her disappointment at losing the ability to fight with a sword, it hadn’t ever been her favorite bit of magic. But it’s hard to deny that there’s something strangely _right_ about throwing herself into the middle of combat like this, especially with Clancy at her side.

Now, if only they weren’t ripping their way through legions of the same animals that they’d taken care of for months on end, everything would be _perfect_.

Ruby wreathes herself in shadow and scythes directly through the rotted remains of a manticore, tearing it messily in half. She leaps to one side just in time for Clancy to come crashing through with both swords out and a truly devastating downwards double-slash that reduces a trio of animals so withered and broken that she can’t even make out what they were to begin with.

“You’ve still got your elbow sticking out too far,” she says as she falls into step with him, and receives a stuck-out tongue in response that just looks _completely_ bizarre in contrast with his ashy, dead skin and the black veins creeping up past his collar.

“Your defence sigils are crooked,” he shoots back.

“I’m not even _using_ defence sigils, and it’s not like you’d know anything about them even if I was – hey, duck – ”

He does, with practiced ease, and a full-grown chimera goes sailing right over his head, just in time for Ruby to sweep out a series of chords and rupture it in half. And they stop talking for the next few minutes, because fighting and paying attention to that fighting is a much better idea, and there is a _lot_ of fighting to do.

By the time they emerge into a relative respite, Ruby is panting and swaying slightly on her feet, and there’s a whole lot of gunk in her hair that she _really_ doesn’t want to think about. Clancy is looking a _lot_ better, but only because he’s mostly-dead and can’t actually get exhausted. He grabs her elbow and stares over in the direction of Twinford, several miles to their east. “Do you think they’ve noticed?”

“What, that the battle of the century is going on right outside their front door at the crack of dawn?” Ruby leans into him for a brief second, catching her breath. “Prolly not. That would require them to be actually _observant_ for once.”

“That’s kinda unfair, they’re plenty observant,” Clancy points out.

“When it _suits_ them,” Ruby mutters, and this is when the signal goes off. A multicolored spiral of colorful sparks hangs in the air, not too far from where they are. There are a _lot_ of animals between them and it, though, and Ruby and Clancy share a glance.

“Direct route?” he offers.

She nods, and scrambles up onto his back for the second time today – although this time, she ends up looping her legs over his shoulders, inelegantly balancing her guitar to one side of his head. He reaches up to kind of hold her in place. It doesn’t look pretty, but it’s functional, or at least she _hopes_ it’ll be.

She plays a chord, and a shield of angry ghosts rises up all around them, and she says, “Right, _go,_ ” and Clancy charges right into the fray. Any creatures that even so much as come _close_ to them go flying like magnets repelling away from their presence. This isn’t exactly a new manoeuvre for them – they’d invented it pretty much as soon as it had become apparently that Clancy’s tolerance for lifting things had become way, _way_ better – but it’s the first time in a while that they’ve done it, and the first time for real that they’d done it in a properly dangerous situation. It could use some work.

It gets the job done, though, and before long they’ve made it to a downwards dip of a hill, beyond which are several craggy rock formations. And right in front of them, standing there with her hands behind her back and watching everything go down like a general directing her troops...

“Welp,” says Ruby.

It _is_ Buzz, is the thing. All the evidence had been pretty conclusive towards it being her up to now, but it hadn’t actually sunk in properly that the one behind all of this was the person whose job basically amounted to ‘Spectrum’s glorified secretary’. She doesn’t even look that different. She hasn’t had a dramatic villainous wardrobe chance, she hasn’t picked up a sword and isn’t hovering in midair with her eyes lit up bright red. The only _real_ difference is that her expression is sharp and intense, where it had before been distracted and vague. And the flute. The flute that she’s holding is new.

Ruby’s getting some serious bad vibes off this situation in general, and some specific bad vibes off Buzz, but the flute is giving off _really intense_ bad vibes. She’s pretty sure it’s an evil magic instrument. It’s a _stupid_ evil magic instrument. Her guitar is so much cooler on every conceivable level. Can you shred wildly on flute? No, no you cannot.

“Hey, so,” says Ruby, and that’s when Buzz starts trying to kill them. She raises her flute like a conductor’s baton, pointing it right at them, and swarms of glittering bloody scarab beetles race in their direction. Ruby strums up a weak shield, and Clancy carves them out of the air as fast as he can, but they show no sign of stopping – they just keep coming, seemingly out of nowhere.

Someone grabs Clancy’s ankle, and he pauses before looking to one side and downwards, and there’s Mouse looking up at them, face tight with stress and streaked with grime. Apparently she’s been hiding behind a rock, and it looks like everybody else is too.

Ruby hops off Clancy’s back, and starts strumming up a storm – a literal one, a dust storm that obscures the vision of everyone and everything present enough so that she and Clancy can slip out of sight and join everyone else behind the rock.

“You were right,” says Elliot immediately, voice low and tinged with incredulousness. “I can’t believe you were actually _right_ about Buzz being evil. How are you not even surprised?”

“Years of practice. Being surprised wastes time, honestly. Good job on not engaging,” she adds, reaching out to pat Del on the arm – feeling weirdly teacher-ly, which doesn’t make sense because she’s currently younger than Del on every level except maybe emotional.

“What’s the plan?” Clancy asks, keeping his voice super low too. “On the count of three, we rush her...?”

“Yeah, that’s not happening; we _will_ die,” Elliot says immediately. “You didn’t see her five minutes ago. I can’t – I can _not fucking believe_ the goddamn _receptionist_ was a secret evil badass.”

“Hey,” says Ruby. “ _I’m_ a secret evil badass.”

“‘Secret’?” Mouse mutters.

“‘ _Evil_ ’?” Red wonders.

“Thank you for not questioning that I’m a badass,” Ruby says, nodding. “Everybody stay down. I’m gonna do something awesome.”

“Oh god,” Clancy says with a tone of voice that communicates exactly how long he’s had to deal with Ruby’s particular brand of nonsense for and just how tired he is of it. “This isn’t going to be awesome. This is gonna suck.”

Ruby doesn’t bother to dignify this with a response.

“Yo, Buzz, you want to let me know what’s happening?” she calls, standing up. Her fingers are on the strings of her guitar, ready for action at any moment. “Because honestly, I feel like I walked into the middle of the final season of a really shitty soap opera without any context. If you have an evil villain monologue ready, this is the time – ”

In response, Buzz raises the flute to her lips and lets loose a flurry of piercing, piping notes that zing right towards Ruby with deadly precision. She doesn’t even attempt to counter that with music of her own. She just cringes back and raises her guitar to try to deflect them. It works – the bursts of noise go ricocheting off into the desert – but several ominous cracks split the wood of the instrument.

“ _Rude,_ ” she yells.

“Stupid!” Buzz calls back.

Ruby falters for a moment, and then, “Wait, are – are you calling me stupid?”

“You walked into a trap so obvious that Froghorn could have seen it coming half a mile off,” Buzz says, with a kind of vicious delight that Ruby had _never_ expected to hear from her. “Coming out to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night? _Yes_ I’m calling you stupid.”

Ruby frowns, and for a moment forgets entirely about fighting. “Why bother setting up the trap if you thought I wasn’t stupid enough to walk into it?”

“Oh no,” Buzz says. “You’re fourteen and predictable, you were always going to walk right into it. I just felt like making fun of you for it.”

“Hm, okay,” replies Ruby. “Well, you’re mean and I hate you and I’m gonna wreck your shit now, so. Brace yourself.”

What follows next is several minutes of high-speed, high-energy back-and-forth as the two of them throw energy and melodies and angry whips of darkness at each other so fast that even _Ruby’s_ having trouble keeping up. All of the animals are no longer bothering to attack the house, because there’s nobody there. Instead, their ragged remains (Ruby and Clancy had carved through quite a lot of them on their way out here) are now congregated around the site of Ruby and Buzz’s fight like the audience to the world’s deadliest musician’s throwdown.

“You know, a lot of people have tried to kill me before, but usually they actually had a _reason,_ ” Ruby puffs, trying to dance nimbly back out of the way of Buzz’s blows and failing miserably. “Granted, said reasons always turned out to be pretty shitty and along the lines of ‘I hate children and I’m going to take it out on you’, but _still._ I always kinda liked you, if I’m honest! You were neat!”

“I’m flattered,” Buzz replies. “Now hold still. You’re making this _so_ much more difficult than it actually needs to be.”

“Uh, _no thanks,_ I like all my limbs right where they are, thanks.” Ruby tries to play a succession of jarring, stirring chords to turn all of the undead animals to her side, but it has basically no effect whatsoever.

“It’s not your limbs I want,” Buzz says, and for a moment they both pause in trading blows, drawing back to pant and regain their energy. “And I’m not going to kill you unless I _absolutely_ have to.”

Ruby frowns. “Then – ”

“Your eyes.”

“My eyes?”

“Did nobody _tell_ you that your eyes contain the secret to immortality?” Buzz asks, her own eyes glittering with something neatly situated in between amusement and malice.

“Uh, _no?_ ” Ruby says, her voice jumping up nearly a full octave. She tries very hard not to look at the rock where the rest of her friends are currently crouching, even though she really wants to see their reactions to this. “Do – is that the sort of thing that people _usually_ get told?”

“You know, I thought I’d lost it forever when you died,” Buzz says, almost conversationally. “And after several years of exhaustively going through the Spectrum records, I _knew_ I’d lost it forever. I was just beginning to wrap up all the loose ends – Baker, Byrd – when, to my surprise, _you_ showed up.”

Ruby swallows, throat very dry. “Yeah, that... wow! Must’ve been a huge shock for you!”

“A _delightful_ surprise, actually.” Buzz seems to shake herself out of her brief hiatus, and promptly resumes flinging bursts of magic in Ruby’s direction – and Ruby really can’t do anything but dodge and block. Although Buzz seems to be getting more and more sloppy with her shots, and she barely has to do any work to avoid them.

And then Ruby sees that Clancy is behind Buzz now, apparently having looped around to her back in the chaos, and Buzz hasn’t noticed, and he waves silently before making a motion with his hand like a crab claw clicking together. Pincer movement. Neat. Ruby grins. This is going to work, she can feel it, and everything’s going to be fine if she can just –

She reaches for her guitar, but can’t reach the strings. And it’s really, really strange that she can’t reach the strings, because the strings are literally _right there,_ and...

And it has just hit her that there’s probably a very good reason why Buzz had been missing all of those very easy shots earlier.

“Nobody come out!” she yells in sudden panic, trying to look back at the rock that everybody had been hiding behind, but not able to manage that either, because all of a sudden her entire body is pretty much completely paralysed. She can, however, see Clancy, who’s also been caught, unmoving. He pulls a horrified face at her, which she’s pretty sure she’s mirroring. “She’s – she did some sort of _string array?_ ” She squints, and is now able to see the fine, almost-invisible threads of some wickedly strong material that criss-cross the immediate vicinity with razor-sharp precision. The threads that are currently binding her quite firmly in place.

 _Hm!_ thinks Ruby. _May have been a bit pre-emptive on the whole ‘this is going to work and everything’s going to be fine’ thing!_

“Hold still,” says Buzz, with a nasty edge to her voice. She steps forwards, deftly navigating the strands, and approaches Ruby. She reaches out, and takes the guitar from her grip before very carelessly dropping it to the ground with an awful ringing crunch.

“You’re a bastard and a bitch at the same time and I don’t care if that doesn’t make any sense,” Ruby tells her. “And also, fun fact, hell doesn’t exist and I know that for real, but you’re definitely going there anyway! Please stop staring at me like that, it’s making me extremely uncomfortable.”

“Shut up while I tear your eyes out,” Buzz says.

Ruby freezes, and then begins struggling fiercely. “Well, okay, _no,_ that’s super not happening, so how about we just – ” Buzz’s hand is getting really, really uncomfortably close to her face! It’s bad! It’s very bad! “ – I _will_ bite your fingers off, that is a _promise._ Get away from me, you – ”

There is an explosive, all-encompassing _twang_ as every strand snaps at once. Buzz swears and stumbles back.

Ruby’s skin stings from the backlash, but that’s the least of her concerns right now, because she’s free, and there’s suddenly a lot of movement in the sky and on the ground that _isn’t_ the zombie animal hoard.

And then, before she can properly process this, Blacker swoops in like a goddamned deus ex machina, and yells, “ _GET ON,_ ” at the top of his lungs. Ruby is too stunned by this development to even _think_ about arguing, and she scrambles to join him. He almost immediately takes off, to Buzz’s evident displeasure, because they spend the next few seconds dodging blasts of sound and energy and some of the most burning, seething resentment Ruby’s ever encountered.

“You can _fly on a sword?_ ” Ruby yelps, throwing her arms hurriedly around Blacker’s waist to prevent herself from falling off. “I thought you just, you know, never learned. I didn’t think you _had_ one.”

“‘S been a while,” he admits, clearly out of breath, “and both me and the sword are rusty, but – ”

Ruby glances down, and his sword is indeed extremely rusty. “ _Dude._ ”

“ – but it’s working out for me so far, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” she has to admit. “Good save. Although, there’s, um – ”

“A lot of other kids down there that I abandoned by just saving you and nobody else? Yeah, don’t remind me, I feel terrible, but also – ”

“I was the only one in immediate mortal peril?”

“Pretty much.”

“Thanks for that,” she says. They circle around in mid-air, a neat (if wobbly) loop high enough that the shots Buzz is firing up at them can’t quite manage to hit. “I take it you didn’t come alone.”

“He did not,” says another familiar voice, and Ruby nearly falls because she hadn’t expected to see _Froghorn_ right next to them, hovering with his arms crossed. “Because he, unlike you, has some amount of _common sense._ ”

“To be _fair,_ ” Ruby begins.

“There is nothing ‘fair’ about this so I, frankly, cannot wait to hear where you’re going with this – ”

“ _To be fair,_ I had literally no idea that Buzz was going to turn up and be – be all _evil._ It was just going to be, you know, a fun funky little midnight seance, a mildly spooky ghost party in an abandoned house...”

“Without telling me?”

And that’s Hitch. Hitch has joined the party. This is not a party that Ruby is enjoying. This is a ‘put Ruby on blast for her terrible decisions’ sort of party. Ruby would much prefer a pizza party, but she never seems to get a pizza party when she actually wants one.

“...We were planning on being back before you noticed we’d gone,” she says.

“ _‘We’?_ ”

“Oh,” says Ruby, “oh, right, yeah – I found Clancy? He’s alive. Well, no, he’s extremely dead, but he’s... he’s conscious.” She pauses. “Actually, this can all be blamed directly on him. So if you’re angry at me, don’t be. I don’t deserve it. This is all Clancy’s fault.”

“Listen,” says Hitch, “I understand that with everything you’ve been through and the amount of maturity you’ve displayed in the past few years, grounding you would be ridiculous and also more than a little bit condescending.”

“It would,” Ruby agrees nervously.

Hitch nods. “That being said, you are _absolutely_ grounded.”

Ruby pulls a face. “I want to argue, but also can we _please_ do that later and try to save every junior member of your magic spy organization from getting ritually slaughtered by a psychopathic receptionist first?”

“Oh, right,” says Blacker, and digs through his pockets before producing three crumpled-looking scraps of sigil-paper. “Where’s-?”

“My guitar? Uh, Buzz took it,” Ruby says, with a wince. “I was kinda... tied up at the time.”

“We can work with that,” Hitch says. “What are those?” This being directed at Blacker, who’s currently activating the three sigils with a look of determined concentration.

“Should get rid of anything remotely undead down there, clear up the space for us a bit,” he says, gesturing down at the hordes of animals – many of which are now engaged in fighting with Clancy and the other juniors, from what Ruby can see.

Oh shit. Clancy.

“Gimme those before you send them down,” she says hurriedly, making grabby-hands. “Clancy – he – ”

Blacker relinquishes them immediately, saying, “Oh _no,_ yeah – ”

Froghorn says, “What?”

“My best friend is an undead zombie warrior,” Ruby explains, hurriedly adding several conditions and adjustments to the sigils. “And if we end up re-killing him, I’ll get really really mad at all of you, and you don’t want me when I’m really really mad.”

“Of course he is,” Froghorn mutters. “Can’t you do anything in your life normally?”

“No,” says Ruby, and activates them properly. “That would be boring.”

She looks up at Blacker, and they share a nod, and then she throws them down as hard as they can. They shoot down with incredible force, expanding off their paper and hitting the ground hard enough to knock everyone down there back. Almost immediately, the creatures below begin to crumble and shatter into dust. Ruby feels her chest tighten a bit, even though her animals have been dead for years now, and she’d only just been carving through them a few minutes ago. She shakes it off. There’ll be time to grieve later, probably.

“Right,” she says briskly. “So, just a quick heads-up, Buzz is _brutal,_ apparently, and absolutely prepared to kill a bitch – ”

“Well, yeah, she worked in customer service for over two decades,” Blacker points out.

“...Maybe we should have seen this one coming, actually,” Ruby admits after a pause. She squints downwards. Buzz has given up on firing at them, and now is throwing her full effort and viciousness at the combined forces of Clancy, Red, Elliot, Del and Mouse. Spells are flying every which way, and swords are also flying every which way. “We should – ”

Hitch is already moving, swooping down to join the fray. After a moment, so does Froghorn. Blacker and Ruby remain in the air, hovering. Blacker says, “We need to get your guitar before we can do anything.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ruby agrees, scanning all over for a good point of entry. “Left it down there, so let’s try to be sneaky about it?”

“Sneaky I _can_ do,” Blacker tells her, and down they go, spiralling downwards into the fray.


	10. don’t you wish all the important plot-relevant backstory would stop happening offscreen

The air is immediately a lot more charged, both with tension and with energy, and also with a lot of miscellaneous shrapnel flying left right and centre which Ruby has to flinch back to avoid. Her guitar is on the ground, where she’d left it. Buzz is just about to step backwards on it. Ruby lets out a tiny little whine of horror and mutters, “ _Not my baby, you bitch –_ ”

“Whoop, that’s not good,” Blacker says, and hesitates for a moment before swooping in low and pushing Ruby off at the last moment, so she stumbles to the ground just in time to snatch it up. The uppermost E-string is snapped, but the rest of it is still functional. She holds up a hand as Blacker circles around, and is tugged back up to join him on the sword just as Buzz swings around, looking furious.

“Nice!” Ruby exclaims appreciatively.

Blacker is visibly shaking. “I have no idea what I’m doing, and I think I’m running on pure adrenaline. I was never meant to be be a field agent, Ruby! Why did you _want_ this?”

“You’re doing fine!” she reassures him, and scans the ground before spotting five people standing back-to-back. She points. “You’re not good to fight, I don’t think, so how about you just drop me off over there?”

“I can do that! Not fighting sounds good!” he agrees, relieved, and proceeds to do just that, letting her off right next to her friends before taking to the sky with a vague cry of, “I’ll do air support! Maybe? I don’t know what I’m doing!”

“Hi guys; here to provide magic buffs and miscellaneous necromantic services!” Ruby says, hitting the ground and immediately doing her best to beat back the dark, writhing shapes that Buzz seems to have summoned in place of the resurrected animal army without a high E-string.

“This was meant to be a _fun_ seance,” Elliot moans.

“No such thing,” Ruby says cheerfully. “Welcome to my world, y’all. Kinda sucks, huh?”

“ _Kinda,_ ” Del agrees, and Ruby ducks neatly as she takes a sharp swing over Ruby’s head. “So, do you think we’re all actually going to survive this, or-?”

Buzz is kind of going insane with power, several metres to their collective right. It’s horrifying to witness. Hitch and Froghorn are the two that are currently facing off against her, and although they’re giving it their all (and they have a _lot_ to give), it seems like they’re fighting a losing battle.

“Uhm,” says Ruby. “Let’s take a rain check on that. Get back to me later and I’ll let you know how we’re doing.”

From the sky, several swirling sigils rain down, bursting as they impact the ground and sending plumes of smoke and magical energy everywhere. Thanks, Blacker.

“Just to check, you guys came here alone, right?” Clancy calls over to Hitch.

“Just the three of us, when we realized Ruby was gone and the barrier had been breached,” Hitch yells back, and somehow manages to convey the fact that he’s raising an eyebrow curiously even from so far away. “Why?”

In response, Clancy just points.

Ruby hears Buzz mutter, “You’ve got to be _kidding me_ – ” and then an assembly of sword-riding mages rush to join everyone in one fantastic wave of force. At the very front –

“What the fuck is _LB_ doing here,” Elliot breathes. Clancy appears to be attempting to hide behind him, but his swords are poking out and also Ruby thinks that LB could probably care less about one (1) undead teenager right now, judging by the expression on her face.

“Casey Morgan, I presume,” she says, landing and stepping to stand at the very front of the assembled ground. “I must offer you my wholehearted congratulations for somehow, _somehow_ managing to evade all our standard screening procedures for... twenty years, was it?”

“Twenty-two,” Buzz replies. “Twenty-two fucking years, and you _never_ gave me a raise.”

LB frowns and very delicately swivels her head to look around at everyone there, currently in various stages of bleeding, sweating, and dishevelment. “Considering the state we’re all in right now, I’m thinking that maybe not giving you a raise is exactly what you deserve.”

Froghorn clears his throat, and then says, very quickly, “For the record, I would like to state that me being here is obviously not a thing that was condoned or sanctioned by Spectrum in any way and since I more or less officially resigned yesterday it means that you can’t take anything out on me for just trying to help – ”

“Do shut up,” says LB without looking over at him. “I’m not holding grudges for you duelling me yesterday, but for god’s sake, man. You were getting your collective asses kicked. That’s just embarrassing.”

Froghorn makes a wounded noise, but actually does stay quiet. The power of LB is pretty astounding, actually.

“I don’t suppose you’d consider just giving me Ruby Redfort and letting me walk away from her?” Buzz says, sounding fairly dispassionate about it. “Considering you _did_ try to hunt her down for a fairly lengthy stretch of time, I’d suspect this won’t be a very hard sell – ”

“Redfort?” And LB blinks. “What on earth would you want with her?”

“Uh, she wants my eyes, I think?” Ruby volunteers tentatively from where she’s being half-hidden behind four eighteen year olds and a zombie, all of which seem to have taken it upon themselves to shield her bodily from Buzz.

“What?” says LB, sounding kind of horrified, and then, “ _No._ I don’t – no. You can’t have her. _Or_ her eyes. Why are you trying to rip out a teenager’s eyes?”

“Okay, back to Plan A,” Buzz replies, and raises her flute to her lips.

“That’s the fighting plan,” Red says loudly, just in case nobody understood that, but it’s kind of unnecessary because everybody did.

Everything whirls into chaos. There are now close to thirty Spectrum agents here, not counting Hitch and Froghorn and Blacker and the juniors – and of course, LB – but Buzz is _stupidly_ skilled, as it turns out. She’s beating all of them back like it’s nothing

Ruby starts plucking out a rousing, screeching battle hymn, and after a second, Hitch’s clarinet rises over the clamour, joining it and balancing it out somewhat. She’s not sure what effect she’s attempting to garner, but it seems to be acting as a shield of some sort, beating back near-fatal strikes to her various friends, acquaintances, and people she feels kinda neutral towards and could care less about. That’s good. She can appreciate that.

And then she’s caught by the neck, and she nearly chokes and starts struggling before a hand grips her wrist and she drops her guitar onto the ground for the _second_ time that day. It’s really going through the wringer.

“If you even try whistling, I _will_ snap your neck,” Buzz – Casey Morgan? – no, Buzz is probably easier, at this point – hisses in Ruby’s ear. “I only need your eyes, I don’t need you to be alive as well.”

Ruby swallows. “But me being alive would be a nice bonus, right?”

Buzz doesn’t answer, which – all right! Fun! Nice and cool!

“Put her down, Buzz,” LB says, quite evenly and reasonably. “We can talk about this. Whatever you want – ”

“She wants some sort of code hidden in my eyes so she can become immortal and rule the world or something,” Ruby offers, skipping past all the boring stuff and getting straight to the point before any of this can become even more pointless and drawn-out than it strictly has to be.

“Sounds about right,” Clancy mumbles.

Buzz looks _pissed._ “I also want _you_ dead,” she snaps, glaring at LB – and then the glare snaps sharply across to Hitch, and Ruby’s eyebrows raise because she had _not_ seen that one coming, “but that’s just a bonus.”

“Oh, cool,” Ruby croaks. “How about instead of killing me or them or anyone else, you spend a good few minutes giving us the backstory on that? Is this still about LB not giving you a raise, or-?”

“It’s a long story,” says LB, eyes not leaving Buzz’s.

Ruby tries not to wriggle too much. “Long is good. Long is _very_ good.”

“She’s extremely bitter because I was the first female mage during a time when membership of our organization was _extremely_ misogynistic,” LB clarifies, which... does not explain all that much. But she’s talking, and Buzz seems inclined to let everybody listen, which gives Ruby time to formulate a plan.

Ruby does not have a plan. Yet.

“Oh, revenge plot for anti-sexist reasons,” she says, trying not to gag, because Buzz still has her by the neck. “Fair enough, I guess. Buzz, do you think you’re effectively utilizing girl power by summoning an army of the dead to lay waste to a bunch of terrified teenagers?”

“Do you ever stop talking?” Buzz growls.

“No,” say quite a few people at once, including Ruby.

“It really should be noted that she tried to kill quite a few people at the tender age of... ten, I believe?” LB adds. “Pre-teen, certainly. It was very traumatizing.”

“Please go to therapy, all of you,” mutters Mouse from somewhere near the back of the crowd.

One of Ruby’s hands drifts upwards and neatly swirls a bloody little pattern on Buzz’s sleeve, too quickly for her to react to. Buzz stiffens like she’s just been jabbed with a cattle prod or a fully-charged electricity sigil or something. With a cry of pain, she snatches her hands away from Ruby, who – although kind of confused, because she hadn’t actually _meant_ to move her fingers like that – does take the opportunity to stumble away and trip, slightly unsteadily, back in the direction of the others. 

“Nice one, kid,” Hitch says, catching her by the arm.

“I,” Ruby starts, and then stares at her hands in complete confusion, and then up at Buzz. “...That wasn’t me?”

“What?” asks Clancy, but there’s not really any more time to dwell on that, because it’s at this point that LB and Buzz start to engage in what is probably the sickest, most impressive, first and last sword-flute duel Ruby has ever seen in her life. They go at it like wild animals – LB driving at Buzz like a force of nature, her sword flashing in the dim morning light as Buzz blocks and counters with the flat of her flute, bobbing and weaving and intermittently raising it to her lips to blast out a short, sharp bar or two of vicious melody for LB to counter with more dodging and weaving of her own. It could go on for minutes, or it could go on for hours. The percussion of the sword and flute clashing pairs with the screeches of music, and everybody just stands there _watching,_ nobody really willing to intervene.

And then, LB’s got her sword at Buzz’s neck, and Buzz is raising her hands slowly in surrender. She opens her mouth to speak, but before she can, LB just... runs her clean through.

It’s such a swift, neat movement that it almost seems _casual_ in its brutality. One moment she’s staring her down, and the next she’s just inserted the long length of cold steel into Buzz’s stomach with an expression eerily similar to the one you’d make if you’d just managed a successful parallel parking job in a particularly tricky parking lot.

“Oh,” says Buzz, voice oddly soft.

“That’s for pushing Hitch into that gharial-infested river when we were preteens,” says LB, and pulls the sword out.

Hitch makes a tiny strangled noise. “Sorry, the _what –_ ”

“And this,” she says, and drives it through Buzz’s throat, “is for _everything else._ ”

Buzz makes a horrible cut-off gurgle noise, and an aborted little movement with her hand, and then she’s dead. Ruby actually sees the light leaving her eyes, and feels a faint tug of resentment as her spirit leaves her body, and almost immediately starts plucking at her guitar, thinking, _I can’t let her get away, I can’t –_

“Here,” says Froghorn, inexplicably right next to her, and she looks up from where she’s waging a frantic tug-of-war with Buzz’s angry, writhing soul, to see that he has a containment bag open. He looks pale and vaguely ill, but his mouth is set in a determined little line, and after a moment of stunned silence between them, snaps, “Do I need to walk you gently through it or are you going to stuff her in the damn bag yourself, Redfort?”

“No need to yell; necromancy is _hard,_ ” she snaps back, but does start unspooling the melody, threading it downwards to the bag and forcing her in as quickly as she can. Froghorn quickly and efficiently draws the string on it, closing it off permanently, and then starts casting strengthening enchantments all over it.

Ruby wants to offer critiques or maybe make fun of him, but her arm is burning and it’s really kind of distracting. At first, she thinks it’s just the final curse scar erasing itself, and tries to pull away her jacket to check – but as she does, the pain gets more and more intense, and she lets out a yell, and stumbles sideways as an immense headache also hits her.

“Rube?” Clancy asks, eyes going wide. He reaches for her, but she’s already falling to her side.

A million thoughts are whirling through her head, including _was I too late?_ and _well, guess this is it; this is how I die,_ but when she passes out ( _again_ ), it isn’t blackness, like she’d have expected it to be. Not in the least.

*

She opens her eyes, and finds herself drifting in a sea of stars.

“This is definitely not what death felt like the last time,” she says aloud.

“Yeah,” says someone right behind her, “actual death probably sucks a lot, doesn’t it? I guess you’d know more about it than me, though.” A brief laugh. “You’re not dead, don’t worry. I just figured it’d be more interesting to meet here rather than... I don’t know, wherever meetings like this _usually_ take place.”

Ruby startles, but doesn’t fall over (mainly because there’s no place to actually fall over _to_ ). After a second, she figures out how to manoeuvre her body so she can turn around and face the person who’s speaking – the person who’s floating in the middle of the blackness speckled with bright, shining stars, at eye level with her.

It’s a tall-ish man; handsome in that way that you get by working out frequently and laughing a lot, and Ruby’s never met him in her life. But she _recognizes_ him, and it takes her a moment to place who he is. She’s seen his face in old photographs and records; younger but still distinct.

“So _you’re_ Bradley Baker,” she says wonderingly.

“And you’re Ruby Redfort,” he replies, eyes bright with barely-concealed delight.

Ruby floats for a moment, completely unsure of what to say. Of all of the events to come out of this situation, she had _not_ expected this. “...Wow. I – I never thought I’d actually get to meet you, did you know that? You’re kind of a literal legend.”

“I could say the same thing about you,” comes the dry response, and Ruby feels the corner of her nonexistent mouth tug up into a half-grin.

And then she starts frowning, because... “Hang on, I’m pretty sure your entire consciousness is meant to be completely obliterated right now. Are you _actually_ Bradley Baker? Because if it turns out you’re some weird resentful demon or god using his face to manipulate me into something, I am going to be _so_ pissed off, you have no idea.”

“I’m flattered that you’d be angry for my sake – ”

“Not really, I’m just sick of being manipulated.”

“ – so am I, as a matter of fact – but, no. It’s me. It’s really me.” He folds his arms and tilts his head back to a skyful of stars. “I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be around for, considering you did the whole end-Buzz’s-existence thing, and that was what it was tied to, but...”

“Oh!” Ruby thinks back to the summoning array; lays out the memory of it in her mind, and... “Wait, wait, wait, you tied your spirit to mine? You’ve... you’ve been _leeching off me?_ All this time?”

“Sorry,” says Baker with a little apologetic grimace. “I... honestly, I just really needed to know how it turned out.”

“ _That’s_ why I’ve been so dizzy,” Ruby mutters. “And why Buzz got zapped... hang on, that was one of _your_ sigils?”

“Sure was.” Baker, looking a bit sheepish, shoots her double fingerguns, which is so unexpected that it makes her laugh so hard she nearly falls over. “Ah – sorry, _again?_ ”

“No, no, it’s – if I tried to bring back Spectrum’s Public Enemy Number One to do a job for me, I’d probably do the same thing. It makes sense, and it’s pretty cool, magically-speaking, and...” She covers her face with her hands for a moment, and then looks at him, unable to hide a massive grin. “It’s... _really_ cool meeting you. I already knew that you were as good at this sort of this as I was, but it’s different meeting you in person, y’know?”

“Sure do,” he says, grinning back at her. “Your notes really were something.”

“Your _techniques_ really were something. That thing with the sword light refraction and the angles – I must’ve used it a million times, back when I still had my core, I couldn’t stop thinking about it for _days –_ ”

“No, no, as long as we’re doing this, I want to talk about your location spell, that thing’s a work of genius – the seven-fold array? The counter-clockwise design? – ”

“ – oh god _nooo_ not the location spell, if we do that I’ll have to tell you why I made it and it’s the _stupidest_ thing – ”

Baker is now laughing, full and enthusiastic, and it’s making him look decades younger. “Now this I’ve _gotta_ hear.”

Ruby very deeply wants to spend the next week talking theoretical magic and spell design with possibly the one non-evil person in the world who’s ever going to understand her, but it suddenly hits her that this entire situation is very strange indeed.

“First,” she says, “I want to know what we’re doing here. Because I could have sworn that I was just watching your girlfriend kill... pretty much the worst person I’ve ever met in my life, actually? And now I’m here? What happened?”

“Ah, right,” says Baker, and the grin abruptly slides off his face. “Well, the thing was... my still being alive and conscious was connected to the curse on your arm.”

“The curse is gone now, though,” Ruby says. “I mean, presumably LB took care of that with the, uh...” She makes a _swish_ noise and accompanying hand motion.

“She did.” A hint of fondness in his voice. “Which is why I’m probably not going to last very long. I wanted to talk to you before I went.”

“Went?”

“Permanently.”

“Oh,” says Ruby, and then, “ _oh._ Like – like, dead? Properly dead? _Actually_ dead _-_ dead?”

He’s nodding along. “Yep, yep, and yep.”

She stares at him in horror. “That – no. Listen, dude, I didn’t ask you to die for me and I never _wanted_ you to die for me, and – and now I’ve found out that you weren’t properly dead, _again,_ and you’re telling me you’re okay with that?”

He’s silent for a long, long moment, and then says, “You know, considering everything, I thought you’d get it.”

“Weirdly, I do not.”

“One of the first things you said after being resurrected was ‘this is why I wanted to stay dead’, and, it’s – ” He runs a hand through his hair, evidently uncomfortable. “Ah, jeez, I don’t know if I want to put any of this on a teenager.”

“You already did when you brought me to life to hunt down and kill someone,” Ruby notes, unamused. “Are you trying to tell me that you’re suicidal? Is that what you’re getting at, here? Because if that’s it, you can just say it.”

The discomfort on his face increases. “I... okay. Yes. That’s it.”

“Cool, good to hear it. You don’t need to die,” says Ruby unhappily. “You need a therapist. Why didn’t you see a therapist? You should’ve done that instead of resurrecting me, that would have been _such_ a good solution to all of this.”

“I mean, the point’s kinda moot now,” he says with a little shrug. “I can already sort of feel myself fading. It’s over.”

“You’ve already died, like, two entire times so far,” Ruby exclaims, struggling not to tear up. She _refuses_ to cry over a man that she’s literally only just met – even though it feels an awful lot like she’s known him forever. “What makes you think this one’s gonna stick? Can’t we – I can sketch up a sigil, try to get you to stick around, I can grow you a new body or something – I don’t know! I’m a genius and so are you!”

“Ruby – ”

“Is any of this fair to LB?” she fires off at him, and he immediately clams up with such a look of intense guilt on his face that she immediately feels guilty herself. “You didn’t even _tell_ her what you were going to do before you went off and killed yourself. I thought you loved her, man!”

“I – ”

“Please think _very_ carefully about what you’re going to say next, ‘cause I’m prepared to get extremely mad if you say something that sucks.”

“I... you’re right,” he allows. “But it’s... a bit late to do anything about that. I’ve probably got another few minutes, tops, before I’m gone forever.”

“So let’s do something about that.” She bites at her arm, drawing blood because it’s the only way she can think of to do it, and then grabs Bradley Baker’s arm, tugging him towards her. Immediately, she starts sketching the strongest binding charm she can think of onto his skin, humming vaguely and forcefully as she does in an effort to channel the energy all around them. “I’m gonna sucker you to my soul until we can work something out, okay? That should stop you from dissipating until we, you know, figure something out.”

“No offense,” says Baker, “but I’m not so sure I want to be stuck in the back of your head forever if this goes wrong.”

“It won’t,” Ruby tells him. “We’re going to get you out and back into a real functioning human body, _somehow,_ and then you’re going to talk to LB and get professional help, and then I’ll be able to actually meet you _properly._ ” She finishes with a furious dab and a swish, and pushes away from him. “I want to talk spell construction with you, and I can’t do that if you’re fuckin’ _dead,_ man.”

“All right,” he says, with a look in his eyes that’s hard to describe. “All right, Ruby. I’ll hold you to that.”

“Good,” says Ruby, and huffs out a sigh. “Good. Okay.”

“Good luck, kiddo,” says Baker, and she feels his hand on her shoulder – warm, firm, and astoundingly alive-feeling, all things considered. “See you soon, I hope. And kick some ass for me, yeah?”

“Already did that,” she replies, and shoots him double finger guns. “See you on the flip side, man.”

The last thing she hears is his surprised, delighted laugh – before everything dissolves and so does she.

*

Ruby sits up with an appropriately dramatic coming-back-to-life gasp, nearly bumping heads with at least three people who are leaning over her.

“Is she – ” says Clancy, sounding downright _terrified._

“Perfectly fine, alive, in my right mind, yeah – all good!” she exclaims, feeling faintly dizzy. She shakes her head. “ _Hoo_ boy, that’s a rush – your boyfriend said hi and sorry, by the way,” she adds, pointing at LB. “He lives in my head now!”

The look on LB’s face is, quite frankly, hilarious. It’s everything Ruby could have ever dreamed of. “He _what –_ ”


	11. let's try to end on a pleasant note

After Ruby runs through a hasty, main-points-only explanation of what exactly had happened with the whole Bradley Baker thing, the problem then becomes _how to get everyone back home._ There’s several Spectrum-issue cars a short distance away, which is probably a good thing because Ruby does _not_ think she’s up to skateswording all the way back to town.

Everybody piles into cars, except the people who apparently have to deal with cleanup (and Ruby does _not_ envy those people, because, like. Ouch), and there’s a bit of chaotic confusion as everybody ends up mixed up and bunched into seemingly random groupings in an effort to get everyone back to town as quickly as humanly possible. Ruby ends up squished between Del and LB, which is a deeply awkward situation that she never could have predicted herself being in – with Hitch in the driver’s seat and Blacker riding shotgun.

There is a long moment of silence as Hitch starts driving, where Del and LB fumble around to set their swords down in the optimum position for not stabbing anyone else.

“Am I – ” Ruby starts, not daring to make eye contact with LB.

“Yes,” LB interrupts, finally finding an acceptable place to rest her sheathed sword. “Fully pardoned, or whatever the official term is. I don’t know. I’m too tired to remember. It’s...” She presses a hand carefully to her chest, and stares at the headrest directly in front of her for a long moment. “...the least I can do, I think.”

Ruby shifts, uncomfortable. “Please don’t be weird about this.”

“Oh, perish the thought.” She’s still staring at the headrest. “Redfort, I... I have made some mistakes. Some truly unforgivable mistakes, in fact, and I’ve treated you _deeply_ unfairly. I know there’s not a lot I can do to make up for them, but I would like to at least try to make up for them.”

“You’re being weird about this,” Ruby protests. “I _said_ not to be weird about this.”

“Sorry, Redfort, but there’s no way not to be weird about this,” LB tells her dryly. “My dead, apparently-suicidal partner is currently living in your head, your magical core is currently living in my body, and I just executed my former almost-classmate for crimes against humanity when I had genuinely no idea she even remembered my name until about an hour ago.”

“Oh,” says Ruby, and considers this for a moment. “Well... keep going, I guess. But don’t be _too_ weird. There’s a limit.”

“I shall endeavour to do so, to the best of my ability,” she says, with considerable dignity. “All this is to say – I apologize. For everything. And you’ll get no obstruction from me, or any of Spectrum Eight. Not anymore.”

“Unless I end up doing something horrifyingly evil?” Ruby guesses.

“Definite ‘horrifyingly evil’,” Hitch says, from the front seat.

“Um – ”

“We’ll take it under a case-by-case basis,” LB says, before Ruby can come up with something appropriately horrifying. “And do it _fairly_ this time. No more pointless sieges.”

“We’re cool, then?” Ruby says hesitantly.

LB takes a very long moment to breathe in, and then exhales. “Yes. We’re... we’re ‘cool’. At least, I am if you are.”

“Never wasn’t,” Ruby says, tentatively reaching out to pat LB on the arm. “I mean, the whole ‘trying to lay siege to my magical animal sanctuary’ thing was kinda messed up, but...”

LB lets out a faint groan, and lets her head thunk heavily onto the headrest directly in front of her. “Goddamn it, Redfort, do I need to offer you an _official_ apology, or – ”

“No, no, it’s – ” Ruby hurriedly retracts her hand. “This is fine. This is good. We can work on this.”

“Nice,” whispers Del, nudging Ruby with her elbow. Ruby grins back at her and accepts a celebratory fistbump.

“Yeah, I’m _really_ glad you made a decent attempt at apologizing,” Blacker tells her conversationally from the front seat. “Because I was _this_ close to aggravated assault on my boss, which isn’t the sort of thing that looks good on my quarterly review.”

LB sighs. “Actually, you’re getting a raise.”

“Sweet,” Blacker says, looking pleased. “Apparently treason does pay. I’ll have to keep that in mind for next time.”

A minute passes, and Ruby notes that the atmosphere in the car has lightened considerably. She clears her throat. “Uh – ”

“What’s up, kiddo?” Hitch asks.

“Well, I’ve just realized that there’s probably going to be a fuckton of paperwork to deal with this, and I’m just here to say,” Ruby takes a deep breath, “ _dibs not._ ”

“That’s really not how it works,” LB says, side of her mouth twitching ever so slightly. “You’ll have to sign at least _some_ forms – ”

“No, stop, didn’t you hear that?” Blacker interrupts. “The kid called dibs. No paperwork for her.”

“I would also like to call dibs not on paperwork?” Del tries, looking hopeful.

Hitch shakes his head. “Too late, only one ‘dibs not’ per international incident.”

The rest of the car ride goes by slightly less awkwardly (but only slightly), and by the time they’re back at the outskirts of town, Blacker, Ruby and Del are tentatively discussing and attempting to identify the sigil that Bradley Baker had used to zap Buzz. LB is not contributing, but does appear to be listening rather intently nonetheless.

Hitch pulls them to a halt in front of the Spectrum headquarters building, alongside the rest of the cars. Ruby immediately kicks at the door insistently until he undoes the child safety lock, and then jumps out to sprint over to Clancy, who had apparently been carpooling with Froghorn, SJ – _SJ!_ Hello, SJ! – and Elliot. “Hey! You all right?”

“I’m good!” he agrees, and sweeps her up in a brief, enthusiastic hug before they break apart. “To be honest, I didn’t actually end up doing a lot?”

“I mean, same; LB was the one who did the whole stabby-death thing, makes a nice change – ”

“Whoa.” SJ is visibly staring, and also she’s dyed her hair, which is a good look on her. Ruby kinda missed SJ. She was neat, even though they’d never really talked all that much. “You _do_ look exactly the same. That’s wild! Do you moisturize really well or something?”

Ruby grins and waves awkwardly, not really sure how to respond to that. “Thanks. My skincare routine involves literally dying and skipping half a decade of linear time, so good luck replicating that, I guess?”

She excuses herself from the conversation after SJ starts muttering awkward horrified apologies, says a brief hello to Doctor Harper (with a promise to talk more later, because apparently the Doc has a _lot_ of questions for her), and, while trying to find a way out of the crowd, finds herself face-to-face with Froghorn.

And now that they’re not in the adrenaline-pumping rush of deadly combat, she finds that she doesn’t know what to say.

“So, this is awkward,” she says.

“Deeply,” he agrees.

Ruby runs a hand through her hair. “Thanks for fighting LB for me, I guess? And not holding grudges about the curse thing.” She pauses, and then adds, for clarity, “That wasn’t me. I was framed.”

“Strangely, I _did_ get that, yes.”

“Probably Buzz,” she muses.

“Probably Buzz,” he agrees.

There is a pause.

“If I were to... you know, hypothetically, come back to work,” she begins.

His sigh says just about everything she needs to know. She grins.

“See you on Monday, then,” she tells him flippantly.

“You’re a terrible little asshole of a teenage girl, and I am _deeply_ unpleased that I’m going to be working with you again,” he tells her with a slight little frown that she somehow finds to be extremely condescending. “But I am glad you had good intentions. And I’m glad you’re alive. Your death was...”

When he pauses, apparently lost for words, Ruby suggests, “Tragic? Heartbreaking? Kind of karmically hilarious despite being vaguely gruesome and horrifying?”

“Difficult,” he decides, and then nods at her. “...Absolutely horrible to have you back, Redfort. Stick around longer this time, if you can.”

Ruby grins, and salutes him. “Good to be back, Frog-man. I’m going to make your life a living hell.”

“I look forward to it,” he says – and is that actually a _smile_ from Froghorn? Character development! – and then he’s gone.

*

In some strange sequence of events that takes place without Ruby fully processing what’s going on, most of Twinford ends up packed into Amster Green. And it really is _most of Twinford,_ because it seems like literally everyone has come out to see what’s going on. And fair enough – the fight, despite having been several miles out of town, had definitely been attention-drawing enough to merit that kind of response, and also it’s probably really rare to see so many mages out and armed like this.

Ruby ends up putting her mask back on and hoping nobody recognizes her, but after Mrs Beesman squints at her shirt suspiciously for a few moments too long, and begins to say something slow and tinged with realization, she beats a hasty retreat, and ends up scaling the big oak tree at the centre of the park. The big _familiar_ oak tree. Before she even realizes what she’s doing, she’s perched up on a high branch and reaching a hand into the hollow at its centre.

There’s something there. She pauses before drawing it out – a tiny paper sword, folded neatly but still slightly crooked at the hilt. She carefully unfolds it, pressing out the old, slightly worn paper smooth on her lap, and reads the message.

The code’s easy enough for her to decode on sight, without even having to think back years and years to remember the code word. It’s a request from Clancy for them to meet up at the Double Donut after she finishes training. Apparently it had stayed there even after the siege and even after five entire years.

She’s definitely not tearing up a bit. Absolutely not.

“Long day, huh,” Hitch says, and Ruby looks down to see he’s leaning up against the tree just below her. He’s abandoned his usual perfectly-tailored dress jacket for shirtsleeves and a look that’s comparatively casual.

“Long _existence,”_ she says, slipping the creased, faded note into her pocket. “What is it? Do I need to give another statement, or – ”

“Nah, you’re pretty much done for now.” His gaze roams out over the rest of Amster Green, which is pretty quiet for the time of day that it is. “I mean, you’ll have to talk to them eventually, but for today...”

“Great, ‘cause I have absolutely no idea what I _would_ say.”

“Mhm,” he says, and then, “I just wanted to check up on you.”

“On how I’m holding up?”

“How _are_ you holding up?”

“I’m...” She pushes up her glasses, and looks across the square, where Clancy and the juniors appear to be catching up. Clancy is gesturing animatedly, and from the way his hands are moving, Ruby is guessing he’s talking about the week where they’d had to take care of a very angry manticore. He looks like he’s having fun. “...I’m alive.”

“That’s the lowest possible bar to clear.”

“And I cleared it; yay me.”

“Hm.” A beat of silence, and then, “Move over, I’m coming up.”

“You’re coming – _what?_ ”

...He’s coming up. He grabs at the lowermost limbs of the tree, loops his arms around them, and tugs himself up with easy grace, and ends up perching a branch just below her.

“You look stupid,” Ruby says thoughtfully. “I don’t think sword-wielding butlers were meant to hang out in trees.”

“Not a butler, kid,” he tells her, but then they fade off into an introspective silence. After a second he says, “So, what next?”

“We gotta get Bradley Baker out of my head,” Ruby tells him decisively, because honestly it’s all she can think about at the moment. Now that she knows he’s there, she can feel his presence – warm, unobtrusive, but definitely lurking there. He’s not, like, messing with her thoughts or even saying anything at all – she’s not sure he _can_ say anything when she’s fully conscious like this – but he’s definitely there. “I’m thinking, grow him a new body or something? Or – you know, get a physical form. I don’t know, this is unprecedented territory. Might take a bit of working.”

“Sure,” he says, “but after that.”

“First,” says Ruby, “I want to see my parents.”

“Okay,” says Hitch. “That we can do. Anything else?”

“And then, I...” She trails off, at a complete loss for what to say. Because _what next_ had never really been something that she’d had time to consider, not for years now. It had all been a long, panicked string of trying-to-survive and trying-to-get-by and not thinking too hard about the future because of the incredibly likely possibility that whatever she planned would be thrown off by yet _another_ unforeseen catastrophe. And now she’s sitting here in the tree on Amster Green like nothing’s changed at all, and there’s no more disasters or villains or monsters to deal with, and she hasn’t got a single idea of what she wants to do with herself.

“Well, your parents are a start, I suppose,” says Hitch when it becomes apparently that she doesn’t have an answer. “And then – _damn._ ”

“What?” Ruby asks, startled out of introspection by the sudden burst of anger.

“I have just realized that I don’t think I can legally _or_ morally force you back into attending middle school,” Hitch says with the intonation of a man condemned.

Ruby stares at him for a very, very long moment. And then she giggles, and laughs, and suddenly she’s leaning up against the trunk of the tree, completely unable to stop.

“Um,” says Hitch, looking nonplussed.

Ruby shakes her head, and then manages to get it together long enough to say, “Can you _imagine_ me rocking up to Grade 9 homeroom next week like the last five years never happened? Just... ‘hello, everyone, I’ve revolutionized circle arrays and necromancy as we know it, but I never passed Chemistry 101, ya mind if I contribute? I’ll just slot in at the back, ignore the ominous guitar strumming.’”

After a moment, Hitch laughs too. “Mrs Drisco _would_ have an aneurysm.”

“Is she – ”

“She still teaches there, and shows no sign of slowing down or losing any spite.”

“ _Damn._ ” Still giggling faintly, she shakes her head. “No, I – no. Not school; I’ve evolved past the need for school. I think I might want to... invent some more things? Good things, I mean, stuff that’ll help people. But I don’t know if I...” She trails off again.

“I don’t need to ask Blacker to tell you that you’re literally always welcome in his office.”

“Yeah,” she says vaguely, “okay.” A pause. “Oh, and Red said she’d teach me how to _actually_ play the guitar, that’s – I think I want to do that. And driving!” Now that she’s properly thinking about it, she’s on a roll. “I never learned how to drive. I think I’m technically legally old enough to drive. And I want to work out how fix Clancy, if I can, so he can actually age and – and do normal stuff again. That might take a while, but I bet you anything I _can._ And... the Mountain Chateau! We can repair that, I _want_ to repair that; I don’t want it to just rot away, not again. If I can get the wildlife moving back into that area...” She trails off, this time lost in thought and planning.

“Well, this is good, a good start. But it’s all big stuff,” Hitch tells her, although he’s grinning. “Long-term stuff. Is there anything more, you know, immediate on your mind?”

Ruby thinks about this. She thinks about it for a while. And then she raises her head.

“I want banana milk,” she tells him.

“Banana milk.” He sounds amused.

“Hey, you asked.” She frowns. “I haven’t had any for six entire years. That’s over two thousand, one hundred and ninety days, give take a leap day or two. Can you _blame_ me?”

“Banana milk it is!” he says with a little huff of a sigh that she knows is more of a performance than anything, and then, “Is this okay?”

“Is what okay?”

“This. Being here. Do you think it’s – ” He breaks off, and shakes his head. “Never mind. Don’t worry about it.”

Nonetheless, Ruby looks out over Amster Green, and sees –

– a laughing Clancy giving a shrieking, panicking Elliot a piggyback, despite being half his size, as the rest of the juniors egg them all on with immense enthusiasm. Froghorn sitting on a park bench, with Blacker perched on the topmost edge of the backrest, the two of them talking and looking genuinely peaceful. Several Spectrum agents she barely recognizes are explaining the events of the day calmly to quite a few groups of concerned townspeople, and at the edge of the square, just barely visible in the comparatively dimmer light... LB. She’s got her head turned upwards to the gradually-appearing stars overhead, and seems to be studying them with an expression on her face that’s almost fond.

Ruby feels a swell of affection in the back of her mind that doesn’t feel like her own, and thinks, _we’re gonna get you back to her, man. I promise._

As if LB had been paying attention to this, she suddenly starts and looks over at Ruby briefly. Incredibly, she _smiles_ , and turns her head up and keeps on smiling.

“...Yeah,” says Ruby, faintly stunned. She recovers quick, because she always has. “I think everything’s going to be fine eventually.” She sits up straight, and then swings down off the branch to land lightly on the ground beneath the old oak tree tree. “Come on. Banana milk. You promised, I’m taking you up on it.”

“Banana milk it is,” Hitch agrees, and slides off the tree branch. “It’s the least I can get for you, I think.”

And as the sun begins to set over Twinford, they head off into the twilight to obtain just that.

_end_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for coming on the ride. Any questions can be asked in the comments, and I'll do my due best to explain (I'm more than aware of the million plotholes, believe me). Also, thank you to everyone else who participated in the Big Bang!! Y'all rock.
> 
> I'm on Tumblr at agentredfort, for more teenage spy shenanigans. You know I love them teenage spy shenanigans.


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